Reset
by turambar499
Summary: One little loose thread from the DCCW's Heroes Vs Aliens crossover has been bugging me: What would lead Barry to send a message back in time from 2056? What if what we saw on TV was not the original timeline, but rather the result of the heroes trying to stave off a darker, more disastrous course in history?
1. Chapter 1

_This story was inspired by perhaps the most glaring loose thread of the DCCW's Heroes vs. Aliens crossover: What would lead Barry to send a message back in time from 2056? My response: What if what we saw on TV was not the original timeline, but rather the result of the heroes trying to stave off a darker, more disastrous course in history?_

 _The normal notes: Characters, environments, etc. belong to the CW. The continuity used is everything seen up to the Heroes vs. Aliens crossover, but details from the crossover itself will be turned on their head somewhat. The rating is T for occasional language and violence. This is written purely for fun. Thanks for reading._

…

Present, 2056 (Occupation)

The flames rose higher and higher into the air, but Barry wasn't concerned they'd be spotted. Fire had become a constant resident for most of the cities in the world since the Occupation had begun. What was one more, especially one so small?

The bright orange light danced across his face, the deep lines and greying hair betraying the relative youth of his body. It was only after decades as the Flash that Barry realized his accelerated healing also slowed his aging, and while yes, he was not as quick as he once was, his bones and muscles were still far more lithe and strong than a normal person in his late sixties should expect. So why did his soul feel bent over like an old man?

Light, quiet footsteps came up behind him, and he turned, considering the woman who had come with him, who had helped him build the pyre of wood and oil. She had been a quirky, enthusiastic, fast-talking hacker with many of the same scientific curiosities as he had, but now she was somber and battle-hardened, with a handgun strapped to her side and a rifle slung over her shoulder. As a normal human, she hadn't aged quite as well as he had, with her jet black hair, which she had long ago stopped dyeing, shot through with grey. Her face was scarred with lines, some from age, some from injury, and her figure had hardened as the times demanded a body built for survival.

"Barry," Felicity warned. "The patrols will be circling back soon. We have to go."

Barry nodded but made no move to leave, instead turning his head to face the pyre again. "We've paid our respects," Felicity added softly. "There's nothing else we can do for him."

Barry muttered quietly, more to himself than to Felicity, "It feels wrong, leaving him here. Not having him with us."

"If it came down to him or us walking away alive, he'd choose us. Every time."

Barry made no reply, other than to slowly ball his fists, but he could feel Felicity's anxiousness to move. Barry had the speed, but the enemy had the numbers. "Barry," she repeated urgently.

"Right. Okay," Barry said. "Let's go." He made a half-turn to speed away, but he swiveled back around to quickly bend over and pick up the "tombstone" for the pyre, a ragged piece of cardboard he had found and on which he had scrawled a name. He tossed it into the fire, realizing that _he_ wouldn't care much for sentimentality anyway. The edges of the cardboard began to blacken and curl as Barry picked up Felicity in his arms and sped off.

He didn't look back as Oliver Queen burned away.

April, 2016 (Prelude)

Barry could hardly bear to watch, spent and exhausted as he was leaning against the treadmill, as "Jay" injected himself with his speed. His pure, orange-yellow speed force swirled and intermingled with corrupted blue speed force around Zoom's body as he arched his back and screamed in pain…or was it joy?

Before he could blink, Zoom was at his side, grabbing him by the neck and swinging him bodily around and away from the treadmill. Zoom's forearm rammed brutally, with superhuman speed, into Barry's chest as he was violently slammed into the wall of S.T.A.R. Labs, and he heard something crack. He assumed a rib, or maybe his sternum, had been broken, but he couldn't be sure. As he struggled, Zoom shifted his grip to exert more pressure on his throat.

"Thank you, Flash," Zoom growled gleefully, and Barry swore he saw murder in those eyes.

"Jay, stop!" Caitlin cried. "Please!" Zoom's head turned to regard her, though his grip on Barry made it hard for him to do the same.

Cisco, Joe, and Iris looked at him with fear, transfixed and with their hands limply at their sides as they beheld Zoom's power and fury. Harry, stubborn as always, lifted his gun at Zoom, in the pointless hope he could fire fast enough to land a shot.

"If anything you ever said to me was true, or anything we ever shared was real, then please just let him go," Caitlin pleaded, her voice cracking in desperation. Zoom's head snapped back and forth between Caitlin and Barry as she begged for his life. Through his rapidly dwindling oxygen supply, Barry was struck at the effect she was having on Zoom, that she was proving he was, somewhere deep down, still possibly capable of human emotion. "Please. I know some piece of you did care for me," she continued, tears forming in her eyes, "so if you have any humanity left, then please…let him go," she finished, her hands drifting together, almost as a literal prayer for Zoom to stop.

Zoom glanced one more time at Caitlin before returning his gaze to Barry. The hate in his eyes was undeniable, but there was also something else. Disappointment?

With a grimace, almost as if it were physically painful for him to make this decision, he tossed Barry aside, back against the treadmill, and Barry desperately sucked in air. He felt Iris's hands on him as he lay on all fours, but he only heard the rush of air and electricity that signaled Zoom had speeded out of the room. He jumped to his feet, despite not really having enough air to do so safely, but he didn't need Cisco desperately calling her name to know that Zoom had taken Caitlin as well.

November, 2016 (Invasion)

"I wish we were a part of this mission," Barry muttered in concern. "He's our president too, after all."

"Well, as Felicity so aptly put it, there are only four of us," Thea chimed in, indicating him, Diggle, Oliver, and herself. "Maybe we should let ARGUS scope out the situation first."

"Besides, Lyla wants us on backup duty. If things go south, she's going to need us as insurance," Diggle added.

Barry nodded, anxiously joining everyone else in watching essentially a small ARGUS army slowly converging on a warehouse in the salt mines on the outskirts of Central City. The screens to which they glued their eyes were glowing with colored dots indicating the advancing ARGUS soldiers, but the target itself, the warehouse, was shielded from surveillance and stubbornly dark on the monitors.

The Earth had experienced an alarming amount of crazy in the past few years, getting exposed to metahumans and magic and everything in between, but its first-ever alien invasion seemed to take the cake. ARGUS had christened the withered, spindly, terrifying beings currently attacking the planet as "Dominators," a name that was the exact opposite of reassuring, after a previous incursion sixty-five years before resulted in a group of human soldiers getting killed. In response to the current threat, Barry had gone to Star City to gather allies, and he now gathered both his and Oliver's teams in a hanger owned by S.T.A.R. Labs to coordinate.

Despite claims that they meant no harm, the Dominators wasted very little time in abducting the United States president. ARGUS had fortunately tracked the president's location to the warehouse and was attempting a rescue, but this operation and everything about this crisis was completely new territory for everyone involved. Barry desperately wished he could call on some experience in the matter.

"I wish we had one on our side," Barry muttered to Caitlin. "Someone who could give us some idea of what we're facing." He slapped his fist softly into his other palm. "I really wished I could contact Supergirl," he said, referring to the alien he had accidentally visited months ago.

Caitlin sighed sympathetically. "I know Barry, but it's like Cisco said. When Harry miniaturized the tachyon enhancer and hid it under your chest piece, he transferred to it the only record of you traveling to her Earth, and Zoom smashed it when he took your speed." She glanced over at Cisco, who Barry knew was listening by the fact that he was staring at his screen a bit too intently. "Without something to guide you and Cisco, you could be searching the multiverse forever trying to find her."

Barry nodded, also glancing uneasily at Cisco. Still on Cisco's bad side due to Flashpoint and his brother's death, he had received a rather brusque lecture on why they couldn't at least try to find Supergirl's Earth among the many out there in the multiverse. The basic argument boiled down to, "You want to find her? Great, do you know her Earth's frequency? No? Do you know the general direction? No? Then have fun."

"It would be nice to have more reinforcements, though," Oliver acknowledged, entering the conversation. "Like having the Legends here."

"Yeah, well, if you know a way to send a message to a time ship zipping through history, let me know," Felicity retorted.

"You don't have any ideas?"

"Dammit Oliver, I'm a hacker, not a quantum physicist." She flipped up her hand to catch Cisco's no-look high-five, his props to her for the pop culture reference. "For now, it's just us," she finished.

"Well," Cisco corrected, "us and about a bazillion ARGUS agents. Looks like there're coming up on the target now." As they watched, the mass of glowing dots on their screens came up to the edge of the dark mass that was the warehouse, surrounding it.

"Can we patch in to their radios?" Oliver asked.

Diggle nodded, entering a command with one of the keyboards. "We can listen, but we can't talk to anyone directly, and there are no cameras in the area." With a final keystroke, their speakers came to life.

"On my mark," Barry heard the ARGUS team leader intone. "Three…two…one…now!" A smashing and cracking noise, the sound of a portable battering ram breaking down a rotting wooden door.

"Go! Go! Go!" As Barry watched, dots streamed into the warehouse and disappeared as they entered the surveillance dead zone. Feedback began spraying through the speakers as their link to the soldiers' radios cut in and out, but he could vaguely hear soldiers muttering "Clear" over and over. It sounded like the warehouse was empty.

Suddenly, a screech blasted through the speakers, so impossibly alien and inhuman that Barry flinched and actually had to put his hands to his ears. It was a million times worse than nails on a chalkboard, a million times worse than the dying cries of a frightened animal. Everyone else crammed their hands against their heads except for Oliver, who grimaced against the noise but continued to focus on the sounds they were picking up. The screeching continued even as Barry discerned gunfire sounds and crashing noises, as if bodies were getting tossed against walls and through posts.

Then, just as suddenly as the cacophony started, there was silence.

Barry gingerly took his hands away from his ears and looked at the screen. No dots were emerging from the warehouse, and the ones that had positioned themselves outside the warehouse were suddenly, unnaturally still.

"What…what happened?" Thea stammered. No sooner had she finished speaking than the stationary dots began to disappear, one after the other in an unstoppable cascade, until the screen was blank, showing only terrain. "What's going on?"

"I don't know," Diggle snarled angrily, frustrated at how little information they had. He stepped away and took out his cellphone.

A few moments passed as everyone else continued to stare, as if trying to will the reemergence of the dots. Finally, Oliver said quietly, "The president's dead."

Iris looked at him fearfully. "How do you know?"

"I heard it," Oliver replied. "Right before they gave the command to open fire, someone yelled, 'The aliens killed the president.'"

Shock and numbness permeated the group. It was true that the world for them had gotten quite a bit bigger since vigilantes and metahumans had entered it, but at the end of the day, they were all still fundamentally American. To be the first civilians to learn of the president's death was a heavy burden.

A burden that, necessarily, they would have to address later. Diggle came back into the group, hanging up his phone. "Lyla's blind, too. Every soldier had a tracker, and they've all been knocked out. With no cameras in the area, we can't see anything."

"Oh, we'll see about that," Felicity muttered as she and Cisco, as one, swung their rolling chairs around to type furiously into their computers.

"Don't bother. The Dominators are projecting some type of interference to block satellites. ARGUS already tried," Diggle informed them. Felicity and Cisco pointedly ignored him.

Barry glanced at Oliver, who shrugged helplessly. "I guess we wait. We need to figure out what they're planning."

…

Before too long, they got their answer.

An alert started flashing on Felicity's computer. She clicked it, bringing up traffic cameras around downtown Central City, and her blood ran cold.

Screaming in the streets. Panic and terror. Men and women dressed in the all-black body armor of ARGUS soldiers, with cold eyes and expressionless faces, gunning down civilians left and right, bashing them senseless with the butts of their rifles, drawing out batons and blades to fight hand-to-hand. CCPD tried desperately to fight back and protect their people, but local law enforcement had neither the resources nor the training to fight a black-ops military organization. Splashes of red colored the pavement.

Felicity's hand drifted to her mouth. She looked back, and everyone was speechless behind her as they stared uncomprehendingly at the scenes unfolding.

Iris's hand shot out to grab Barry's forearm, her eyes filled with panic. "Dad's out there," she said fearfully.

Barry's eyes widened in alarm. "We have to go. Now," he insisted, pulling up his mask. He looked towards Oliver and Diggle, but Diggle waved him on.

"Go," he insisted, pulling out his cellphone again. "Lyla has to know something."

Barry nodded and turned to Oliver and Thea, both of whom had snatched up their bows and quivers. He jumped into superspeed, grabbing each by the collar as he did so, and was gone.

"Hey, I think I'm on to something," Cisco muttered to Felicity. "Give me a hand." Desperate to do something, anything, Felicity swiveled back to her computer, listening with half an ear to Diggle's side of the conversation over his phone.

"Lyla, those are our troops shooting civilians in downtown!" Diggle growled. "What is going on?"

"Bingo!" Felicity cried.

"Yahtzee!" Cisco cheered at the same time.

"Talk to me," Diggle said, urgently. "What do you have?"

"I got one satellite to punch through the Dominators' interference," Cisco said. Clicking a button, he brought up a view of the warehouse again and zoomed in, getting a real-time image of the situation. There was the warehouse, decrepit and seemingly innocuous, and surrounding it were ARGUS soldiers, their guns raised in a defensive posture. They were guards.

"Why are they just standing there?" Diggle wondered, confused. "Why aren't they reporting in?"

"Hold on," Cisco said, zooming in a bit further. "What is that?" A few more clicks, and Cisco acquired a close up of one soldier who apparently lost her helmet and was standing with her head exposed. There, on her forehead, was a speckled, shifting circular pattern of lights.

"What the hell…?" Iris muttered.

"The Dominators must have done something to them," Caitlin ventured. "They're controlling their minds somehow."

"But why are those troops just standing there, when the rest of them are killing civilians in the city?" H.R. asked.

"Maybe because they're protecting something," Felicity said, looking at her screen. "I'm getting a weird signal from inside that building. There's some sort of transmitter inside, and it's broadcasting as far as downtown."

"Where the rest of the soldiers are," Caitlin pointed out.

"Felicity, Cisco, can you connect with ARGUS, so that Lyla can see what we're seeing?" Diggle asked, still with the phone to his ear.

"Already on it."

…

 _What is happening?_

Catching bullets. Snatching guns away. Punching ARGUS soldiers. That was all Barry's mind could focus on, leaving it unable to comprehend the pain and destruction around him.

People were cowering inside shops or behind cars, clinging to each other and too afraid to get up or run, even after he sped through and knocked out their assailants. Bleeding bodies lay on the sidewalk and in the street. Those aware enough to catch a glimpse of him or feel the wind of his passage stretched their arms out in his wake, begging the Flash to help them.

He was the fastest man alive. He should be their savior. He should be their hero.

Every passing second, however, proved that he was still just one man.

The ARGUS soldiers had spread through downtown with brutal efficiency, and their numbers and firepower made it simply impossible to take them down fast enough. Barry desperately worked to move people to safety, knock bullets away, and snatch guns from the hands of the soldiers, but trying to cover as much ground as possible left him with little opportunity to do more than land a punch or two per soldier, and these were no ordinary thugs. These were trained military, and simply taking away their guns and knocking them down wasn't enough. They'd just get back up and grab a new weapon.

The last Barry saw, Oliver and Thea were having as difficult a time as him. Not having any idea what had happened to these former allies, the two archers had quickly run through their entire arsenal of non-lethal arrows. He would occasionally run past a group of soldiers tangled hopelessly in a mess of polymer cables, or swerve past a pile of agents in a heap on the ground, an arrow with a spent canister of knockout gas embedded in the ground next to them. There was just too much chaos, however, and soon they were resorting to their standard arrowheads, hoping against hope they could incapacitate instead of kill.

Barry changed course yet again as he spotted a squadron of CCPD police cars forming a sort of barricade behind which a mass of people were hiding desperately. A small group of police officers were trying to hold off ARGUS soldiers advancing menacingly towards their position, peppering the cars with gunfire. One of those officers was Joe.

In a blink, Barry had taken away all of the ARGUS guns, leaving them momentarily confused at the loss of their weapons. The remaining CCPD took that opening and went on the offensive, causing yet more bodies to drop.

A rush of air, and Barry was behind the CCPD lines, carefully depositing his armful of assault rifles on the ground. Joe looked up at him, and through his steely cop exterior, Barry could see exhaustion and fear. "What is going on?"

"Look Joe," Barry began, ducking behind a car for cover, "these are ARGUS agents. They're on our side."

"No, they're not," Joe replied, looking at Barry like he was crazy.

"Something happened to them. They're not in control of their actions."

"People are getting killed out here! I don't care what's happened to ARGUS. We need to protect _them_!" Joe exclaimed, waving his hand to indicate the terrified people crouched down behind the barricade of cars. " _They_ can't defend themselves."

Barry lowered his head, understanding Joe's perspective in an instant. Barry, Oliver, and Thea had been brought up to speed over their comlinks by Diggle and knew the Dominators were controlling these agents somehow, but all Joe and these cops saw were heavily armed soldiers trying to murder the people they were sworn to protect. Either way, people were dying, whether they deserved it or not.

 _What do I do?_

…

"Lyla, we can't! There're still some of ours guarding that warehouse."

"Johnny, people are dying in Central City. These are highly trained ARGUS agents. By the time all of them are stopped, the casualties will be too high."

"Let Barry and Oliver move in and try to shut down whatever's—"

"No! We have no idea of what's inside. The last thing we need is the Green Arrow, or even worse, the Flash, getting brainwashed by the Dominators too."

"Those ARGUS agents can't control themselves. They're innocent!"

"I'm sorry John. This is my decision. Not yours."

…

Oliver and Thea were pinned down behind some rubble caused by an ARGUS grenade. They had long ago resorted to reusing spent arrows they yanked out of the ground or, more grimly, the fallen bodies of possessed soldiers, but somehow there were always more ARGUS agents, and the siblings were running out of ammunition and options. Whatever control the Dominators had on the agents, it seemed to give them unnatural pain tolerance, as neither bullet nor stab wounds seemed to slow them in the slightest. Crouching behind their cover, the two were faced with the horrifying spectacle of stone-faced ARGUS agents advancing on them, arrow shafts sticking out of their limbs and bullet wounds bleeding down their necks.

Glancing at his sister, Oliver couldn't help the mild distress welling up in his throat upon seeing her clutching two blood-stained swords in her hands. In what seemed like a lifetime ago, when he and Roy patrolled the streets, they both had slots in their boots for storing eskrima batons to use in hand-to-hand situations. At some point, due to her bloodlust, Thea had had her boots redesigned to hold short swords instead. Knowing how extremely crushing that bloodlust had been on Thea's soul, it hurt Oliver to see her forced to give in to those urges again.

Thea caught him looking at her, glanced down at the swords, and shook her head. "Don't worry, Ollie," she said, acknowledging the look in his eyes. "I can do this," she reassured him, though he caught a slight tremble in her voice that told him she was convincing herself as much as him.

A spray of gunfire against the rubble forced both of them to duck their heads down further. Oliver wished circumstances hadn't forced her into the very type of situation that had made her retire in the first place, but unfortunately her mental wellbeing would have to take a backseat to their life-threatening predicament. They were outnumbered, and he only had one green and one red arrow, both taken off dead bodies, left in his quiver. Thea's quiver was empty.

The two locked eyes, understanding that this might be it for them, when a high-pitched whistling noise sounded overheard. They looked up just in time to see something large zoom across the sky, leaving a trail of exhaust in its wake. Oliver and Thea barely had time to wonder what had just happened when an explosion rocked their ears and shockwaves blasted through the ground beneath them. Buildings and lampposts swayed dangerously over their heads as debris began to fall, and Oliver did the only thing he could. He dove sideways, knocking the swords out of Thea's hands, and covered his sister with his own body.

…

Everyone back at the S.T.A.R. Labs hanger looked on in mute astonishment at the scene on their screens. Where there had been a warehouse surrounded by mind-controlled ARGUS agents, there was now only a black crater in the ground.

Lyla had ordered a drone strike on the warehouse in order to destroy whatever was controlling the soldiers, and it worked. Felicity confirmed that the signal she had detected from the warehouse had stopped transmitting.

Cisco brought up various camera feeds around Central City, which showed the ARGUS agents still standing shaking their heads and showing utter shock and revulsion at where they found themselves. As the speckled pattern of pink energy dissipated from their foreheads, many instantly succumbed to the various injuries they had received, seemingly able to experience pain again in the most brutal fashion imaginable. The ones who didn't immediately dropped their weapons and fell to their knees as CCPD closed in around them, radios out and guns drawn.

Somberly, Cisco opened a communication channel to tell Barry, Oliver, and Thea what had happened. Caitlin and Iris had their hands over their mouths. H.R. had turned away, covering his eyes. In spite of the carnage in Central City, all Diggle could think about were the agents left behind at the warehouse to their fate. They never had a chance. They never had a choice.

…

Barry sped all around the city, doing a check to make sure there were no secondary collapses or fires threatening the city after the shockwaves of the drone strike. Luckily, it appeared no major structural damage had occurred, but that was little consolation to the multitude of people dead or injured from the ARGUS attack.

On his third pass through the city, he found Thea walking gingerly from behind a pile of rubble, supporting Oliver as he leaned against her heavily, his arm over her shoulders. He was bleeding from a blow to his head, possibly from falling debris, but seemed otherwise okay.

Running up to them, Barry asked, "You two okay?", painfully aware of how inadequate the word "okay" was given the situation.

"All things considered, yeah I think so," Thea replied.

"But we need to be on alert," Oliver pointed out, still somehow vigilant despite his injuries. "If the Dominators can control minds, we may suffer more attacks like this."

"Felicity and ARGUS are scanning for any signals that look like the one she picked up from the warehouse," Barry informed him. "They'll use drones to take out any other transmitters so no one has to risk getting near them."

"Good," Oliver replied, nodding. "Next, we should—"

Which is as far as he got, for at that moment a massive shadow slid over the three of them. Looking up, they saw an alien ship break through the clouds and position itself over the city. The blast of wind from its sudden descent knocked all of them off their feet, and Barry lost sight of the Queens behind a cloud of dust and debris as he fell to the ground. Before he could get his feet under him, a beam of light surrounded his body. For a split second, he felt himself completely immobilized, as if frozen in time.

Then, darkness.

…

 _Author's notes:_

 _The idea of possessed soldiers feeling no pain was inspired by the Eragon series._

 _The Prelude scene takes dialogue from and refers directly to The Flash 2x18, "Versus Zoom."_


	2. Chapter 2

Present, 2056 (Occupation)

"To Oliver."

Barry and Felicity clinked together dusty glasses and each downed a small shot of vodka. They were sitting on old crates in the Foundry, Oliver's first hideout as a vigilante. True, this base of operations had been compromised on numerous occasions, but as everyone else who knew its location was long dead, that hardly seemed an issue now.

"Forty years, and Oliver's stash of Russian vodka survives," Barry quipped.

"He was always attached to this stuff," Felicity replied, her face still pulled back a bit from the burning sensation the alcohol was running down her throat.

In spite of everything, Barry couldn't help a certain fondness as he looked around. "I still remember the first time I saw this place," he remarked, a tiny smile on his face. "Dig shot me with a tranquilizer dart, and then he brought me here so you could ask me to save Oliver's life."

Felicity chuckled back. "And Oliver's way of thanking you was to choke you."

Barry nodded. "I believe your exact words to me were, 'Never meet your heroes.'"

"Well, he warmed up to you in the end."

"Yeah," Barry sighed. He was suddenly overcome with an acute feeling of melancholy. "He did."

November, 2016 (Invasion)

"Hey Slugger, could you pass the sports section?"

Barry froze.

The sun was shining through the partially open windows. His hand was clamped around a glass of orange juice, as if he were in the middle of picking it up to take a sip, and a heaping plate of bacon, eggs, and potatoes was sitting on the table in front of him. The absolutely delicious smells instantly identified it as his mother's cooking. He was sitting in the dining room of the house he grew up in as a kid. He was home.

There was just one thing amiss. He had precisely no idea how he got there.

"Wha—? What's going on?" Barry stammered, taking his hand from his glass and standing up from his chair.

"Sweetie, what's wrong?" His mother, wearing her favorite blue cardigan, looked at him in concern from across the table.

"Barry, are you alright?" His father put down the local news and stared at him also.

"No…" Barry whispered. _No_ , he repeated in his head. _Flashpoint is gone. I reset the timeline!_

He backed away unsteadily as his parents stood up in alarm. His brain was muddled, not quite sure where it had come up with the word "Flashpoint." He couldn't quite remember where he'd just been before or what he'd been doing. However, he was certain of one thing: he was getting an overpowering sense of déjà vu, and it was _wrong_.

Spontaneously, his left hand became blurred and distorted, taking on an odd, fuzzy appearance. It took Barry a moment to realize that _he_ was doing that. He was making his hand vibrate. _I can do that?_

At the same moment, the entire scene around him grew fuzzy as well, though in a different way. Looking at his parents, the dining room table, the house, everything around him, Barry got the sense he was in a television program, and the picture was filling with static. As his hand continued to vibrate, colors changed shades, smells fluctuated in intensity, sounds oscillated between quiet and deafening, and Barry swayed on the spot, feeling his equilibrium going off-kilter.

Focusing on his hand again, Barry willed it to stop vibrating. Simultaneously, everything around him was brought back into focus as well. His parents, oddly, hadn't seemed to notice the world distorting around them, and still had their eyes only on him. "Barry," his mother pleaded, slowly extending a hand out to him, "please sit down. You don't look well."

"What's the matter, Barry?" his father asked, moving quickly to his side, putting himself in position if Barry lost his balance again. "You look like you've been hit by lightning."

 _Lightning_.

A bolt of electricity crashing through the skylight of his lab in Central City pushed into his memory. Everything rushed back to Barry.

He stepped away from his father and retreated from his mother, hating the hurt look on their faces, as if he were treating them like strangers. This wasn't entirely true, but on the other hand, these weren't technically his parents, either. He wasn't sure what this was, or how he got here, but he knew _who_ he was, and that was all he could hold on to.

"I'm sorry," he choked out, feeling the fresh stab of pain in saying goodbye to his parents once again, before beginning to vibrate his entire body, challenging his newly remembered abilities to their limit. Immediately, the scene around him became chaotic once more. The sunbeams filtering through the windows became grey shadows. The table and chairs warped and merged into each other. The walls deformed into a strange middle phase between solid and liquid before disintegrating entirely. His parents blurred in and out of existence, pictures that just could not achieve proper focus, before fading away.

His perfect world gone again, Barry squeezed his eyes against the wetness that flooded them, against the scene congealing around him into a featureless white void.

A blast of light. Then, once again, darkness.

…

Barry rocked forward from the alcove in which his body had been laid, sparks flying from the small headset that had been placed at his temples as his eyes flew open and he fell on his hands and knees onto the greenish-gray floor beneath him. He felt physically sick from whatever had been done to him when he was abducted, and he felt emotionally sick from watching his parents yet again be ripped away from him. A part of him wanted to collapse onto his stomach and just never get back up again.

"So. You metahumans can resist our dreamscape construct."

Barry scrambled onto his feet, surprised that he wasn't alone. Aside from the alcove, whose shape reminded him disturbingly of the underside of a beetle, the room was empty. The walls and ceiling were solid black, illuminated only by strange green lights and glowing, yellow alien insignias distributed at precise intervals. His attention, however, was drawn to the figure standing some distance in front of him. A figure that, up until now, he had not been able to observe in detail, save in grainy photographs.

A Dominator.

Barry knew he should be frightened. He deduced that he was captive in an alien compound, mostly likely one of their spaceships, and that backup was far away. However, these beings had just forced him to relive getting his parents back only to lose them once again, mere months after he had made the hardest choice of his life to undo Flashpoint. Defiance and anger were his current primary motivators, and so his only thought was that these things were _ugly_.

The Dominator in front of him was tall but emaciated, covered in decayed-looking, greyish skin that did nothing to hide the alien bones and muscle underneath. It stood on double-jointed legs ending in a pair of spindly toes and featured weirdly muscular forearms attached to comparatively skinnier upper arms and shoulders.

The worst part, by far, was its head. Wrinkled, bumpy skin covered a bulbous skull, with no discernible ears or nose to speak of. Slanted eyes, like a hissing cat's, glared out at him, and beneath them was a grotesque, massive mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth. When the Dominator "spoke," its mouth did not move, and it took Barry a few beats to realize he was hearing the Dominator speak directly inside his head.

"Humans should not be able to break through our framework," it said, bemused. "This is just further evidence of the threat you pose."

"What the hell was that?!" Barry yelled, still high on anger from the scene he had witnessed. "Who the hell do you think you are?!"

The Dominator leaned its head back slightly and its eyes narrowed, seeming to take satisfaction from Barry's outrage and panic. "Well," it continued, amused, "it seems the dreamscape still invoked an emotional response, short as the experience was. What did you see?"

"That's none of your business," Barry snarled.

"No?" the Dominator asked. "As a scientist, I would certainly _like_ to know. More data from our test subjects is always better." It waved a hand, and a screen descended down from the ceiling next to it, showing a video of Barry lying in his alcove. He watched himself twitching back and forth, struggling as if in a nightmare but not actually vibrating like he remembered, before he broke out of the Dominator framework and fell out of the alcove. Apparently, his subconscious had manifested his vibrating as a mechanism to escape the dream.

"You ruptured the dreamscape before we could study your thoughts. All we extracted was your name. Barry Allen," the Dominator spat out, as if the very sound of a human name was distasteful to it. "Are you sure you won't tell us more? You could help us refine our experiments," the Dominator sneered.

"I'm done talking to you." Barry snapped into superspeed, charging the Dominator to make it pay for using his parents against him, only to slam directly into an invisible energy field and get knocked back several feet onto the ground. His vision darkened as the feedback from the field coursed through his body, shooting pain up every inch.

Slowly losing consciousness, Barry heard the Dominator tut, a weirdly human thing for it to do. He barely registered the energy field coming down so that the Dominator could approach with items in its hands, and his last thought was fairly innocuous: _Are those handcuffs?_

…

 _Yes. Yes, they are_.

Barry awoke to find himself still on the ground, but now alien restraints had been locked around his wrists, pinning his arms behind his back, as well as around his ankles. He rolled up into a sitting position, groaning, and saw he was still in the same room. The wide entryway looked as inviting as before, but Barry just assumed the invisible energy field was back up. He wasn't really that eager for another firsthand test.

He was, however, a little more clear-headed compared to his last rude awakening. While it had been a shock to his system for the Dominators to use his parents against him, it didn't erase his decision to undo Flashpoint and restore the timeline. Perhaps he wasn't quite at peace with the choice as he thought, but it was still a choice he knew he would make again.

In any case, he had more pressing matters, namely the restraints around his wrists and ankles. Tentatively, he made a first attempt to vibrate out of them only to be rebuffed, which didn't surprise him. Alien technology would undoubtedly be made of a material with which he wasn't familiar. However, ever since that day on Earth-2 when his doppelgänger's pep talk inspired him to phase through Zoom's transparent prison, he had no doubt he could vibrate through anything. He just needed to probe the restraints, find the right frequency…

His captor suddenly appeared around the corner, and he arranged his face to look innocent. "Hey, I gotta pee," he called, petulantly.

The Dominator ignored that, replying instead, "You humans are so fragile. It is most astonishing how grave a threat you pose as a race."

 _Time_ , Barry thought. _I need to stall_. "A threat, huh?" Barry asked, sarcastically. "Last I checked, you're the ones with the menacing spaceships." The Dominator made no response, so Barry decided to just keep talking and focus attention away from his wrists, which he was subtly vibrating at various frequencies behind his back. "So do you have a name? I'd call you E.T., but I don't think you'd get the joke."

The Dominator made a noise, like it was sniffing in disapproval. "Our native language is far beyond your capacity to learn and understand. In your tongue, you may simply know me as the Superior."

Barry cocked an eyebrow. "How modest."

The Superior sensed Barry mocking it and hissed, accentuating its vaguely reptilian features. "Your impudence is not winning you any favor with us."

"Why the hell would I want favor with you?" Barry asked. "You're the ones invading our planet and brainwashing us to kill each other. What did we ever do to you?"

"It is not a matter of what you have done to us. It is what you have the potential to do."

"What, slaughtering human soldiers sixty-five years ago wasn't enough for you?"

Another hiss. "That was a reconnaissance-in-force operation. We wanted to test your strength and threat potential."

"What threat potential? We don't have any grudge with you!"

"You have metahumans."

That caught Barry off-guard, so much so he momentarily forgot what he was doing behind his back. "You're _threatened_ by metahumans?"

The Superior nodded its head gravely. "Sixty-five of your so-called 'years' ago, we became aware of the presence of metahumans on your planet."

Barry was nonplussed. "Metahumans? Sixty-five years ago? What are you talking about? The particle accelerator didn't explode until three years ago."

The Superior either ignored or didn't understand Barry's response, so it continued, "We came to your planet to assess the danger of metahuman emergence among your kind. At that time, we determined the threat to be minimal, but we kept your planet under surveillance in the event it needed to be…cleansed."

That comment began to make Barry's blood boil. "'Cleansed'? Who gives you the right to decide that? What have metahumans ever done to you?"

In response, the screen the Superior had shown Barry earlier once again lowered itself from the ceiling, but the scene being played this time was different. At first, all Barry could see was chaos on a pitted, scarred, barren battlefield. Dominators were swinging, slashing, and thrusting with single bone-like claws extending out of the middle knuckles of their hands against a vaguely humanoid enemy, although he couldn't be sure. The humanoids were clad head-to-toe in black, covering everything including their faces. The two forces were so intermixed that it was impossible to see which side was winning.

Suddenly, a knot of Dominators was blasted in all directions, hissing and screaming in pain, as a humanoid knelt on the ground, hand against the dirt. Shockwaves, like those of a pebble disturbing a still lake, radiated outwards from its palm, causing the air to churn and the ground to quake, and Dominator after Dominator was hurled up and outwards, so forcefully thrown that Barry could even see alien arms and legs breaking under the pressure of the waves.

A loud noise caused the video to swivel in a new direction, and now Barry saw Dominators suspended in the air, screeching and writhing as another humanoid held them up by tendrils of pure electricity shooting from its palms. Other Dominators approached, trying to assist, but the humanoid simply hurled some of its captives at them and then zapped a fresh batch of aliens, lifting them into the air and pumping electricity through their bodies, evoking more frenzied screaming.

Explosions momentarily rocked the camera, causing it to change direction yet again to focus on a scene of Dominators fleeing before another humanoid holding glowing objects in its hands. As Barry watched, the humanoid hurled them at the aliens, rocking the retreating forms with fiery blasts. At first he thought they were grenades of some sort, until he saw the humanoid pick up two rocks off the ground and lightly squeeze them. Soon they began to glow like the two objects before them, somehow being converted from harmless minerals into combustibles, and the humanoid hurled those as well, prompting more explosions and more carnage.

"We have witnessed this across all the known universe," the Superior explained as Barry watched silently. "Time after time, species evolving rapidly into unchecked, unmanaged abilities have threatened our way of life, and so we must counter this threat before we suffer the irreparable consequences of your…contagion."

Barry had to admit, he found the footage he watched disturbing, with the Dominators tortured and killed by individuals with such inhuman powers. Then again, he couldn't disregard the source of the video.

"Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?" he challenged. "For all I know, you attacked those people in the first place." The Superior narrowed its eyes but said nothing. "All I know is that you brainwashed human soldiers into firing on their own civilians. People who had no ability to defend themselves or fight back. They didn't deserve that. This planet has done nothing to threaten you!"

"Nothing?" the Superior asked in a low voice. "You would not call the redirection of time, of the natural course of events, a threat?"

The Superior's slanted, cat-like eyes bored into Barry's as it spoke, and ice flooded his stomach. _Flashpoint_.

Barry's body went rigid, his eyes widening, and the Superior nodded, taking perverse satisfaction in Barry's shock. "Oh yes, Barry Allen, we are well aware of the changes you have made to the timeline. How you consider yourself a god, the course of planets and civilizations subject to your every whim."

"I don't…what… _how_ do you even know about that?" No one should be aware of the changes but him.

"Our senses are not so puny and limited as that of humans. We know when an abnormal ripple has distorted the fabric of space and time, and we have come to eliminate the source of that ripple."

"Me?"

"And all metahumans on this planet, both those active and those yet to come. Your actions brought us here, true, but you may only be the first to exert an unnatural, unchecked influence on the fabric of reality itself. We must make sure you are the last."

Barry's hands tightened into fists behind his back. He had no issue with atoning for his own sins, but the entire population did not deserve punishment for his actions. His choices were his own, Earth's metahumans posed no threat to the Dominators, and to judge the human race on the basis of a single individual's actions was as cruel and unfair as every sweeping generalization throughout history has always been. He swore to himself, one way or another, he would not let the Dominators be the end of Earth.

Coincidentally, that exact moment was when he hit on the right vibrational frequency. He knew now how to pass through his restraints.

"Take me," Barry said, bringing a level of deadly calm to his voice. "Punish me. Leave humanity out of this. You're here for _me_."

The Superior huffed in amusement. "We're here to make an _example_ of you." His captor motioned with its arm, a quiet hiss signaled the energy field coming down, and out of nowhere two Dominators came forward and grasped him by his arms, dragging him towards his fate. "Humanity, and its course of evolution, brought this on itself."

…

Barry was muscled bodily down darkened corridors illuminated by the same strange green lamps and yellow alien insignia panels until he was pushed into a large, semicircular room that he could only assume was the bridge. Dominators operated control panels built into the walls on either side of the doorway he had just been pushed through, and Dominators manned consoles at the other end of the room, in front of the curved window, through which Barry could see daylight shining off the tops of Central City's skyscrapers. It made for a bizarre juxtaposition, standing in the dark, green-tinged bridge of an alien spacecraft while just outside the viewscreen, the city over which the ship was hovering winked at him with stark familiarity.

Now that he was completely surrounded, the Dominators seemed to think he no longer needed babysitting and released their hold on him. Slowly, still held in the restraints around his wrists and ankles, Barry began shuffling to the front, where the window was. "What are you going to do?" he asked to no one in particular, although it was the Superior who answered.

"We will broadcast your execution for your world to watch," it replied in a matter-of-fact manner. "Watching the death of the fastest man alive will demoralize the planet into submission."

Barry snorted humorlessly under his breath. "Not likely."

"Once your race surrenders and ends all resistance, we will calculate the optimal location to drop a bomb from orbit to rid this entire world of metahumans."

That stopped Barry in his tracks as he closed his eyes in resigned, though unsurprised, horror. He had suspected the Dominators would move forward with something like this after hearing the Superior talk about "cleansing" the Earth to remove the metahuman "contagion."

"Only the metas?" Barry asked quietly, standing still.

"Well, there may be some…collateral damage among the normal population. Acceptable losses, we would say," the Superior replied, smugly.

Bioweapons. Prison camps. Aerial bombardment. Barry's mind had been running in circles trying to figure out which disaster he was facing, and now he had his answer. There was no reason for him to be here any longer.

He resumed his awkward shuffle until he was right up against the transparent viewscreen. Slumping his shoulders and putting on an air of defeat, he leaned his head against the window as if gazing at his home for the last time. The looming shape of the Mercury Labs building, one of the tallest buildings in Central City, was approaching underneath.

"Take a good look, Flash," the Superior sneered. "Let the memory of your city carry you into your afterlife."

"You know," Barry quipped, turning around to face the Dominators on the bridge. "You really need to tone down the grandiose villain taunts." With that, Barry vibrated the molecules of his body at the frequency he had identified earlier and stepped out of the ankle restraints, which clanked to the floor. The wrist restraints slipped off as well, and he caught them in one hand.

"Surprises always happen when the villain talks too much," Barry finished, smirking.

"Kill him!" the Superior screeched, but Barry was already in motion, pitching the restraints in his hand at the Dominator's head like an impossibly fast, awkwardly irregular fastball. Barry allowed himself the tiniest satisfaction of hearing the Superior bellow in pain as it grasped its face, and then he turned around and ran straight for the viewscreen window. With supreme confidence, as he had earlier quietly vibrated his head against the window and found it to be a surprisingly mundane form of plexiglass, he phased through the window at superspeed, building enough horizontal velocity to fall into the side of the Mercury Labs building below. With the reflexes only a speedster could master, he planted his feet into the side of the skyscraper and ran straight up to the roof, over the top, and down the other side. He was gone.

…

 _Author notes:_

 _Inspiration for various terms like "Superior," "framework," etc. and the general description of the humanoid metahumans' powers comes from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. No, this is not a super-secret crossover. I just thought it'd be fun to use some AoS aesthetic details._


	3. Chapter 3

December 2016 (Invasion)

"…and now the Dominators plan to drop a bomb to exterminate all metahumans on Earth. What's worse, they don't care about the collateral damage to normal humans."

Oliver had a hand cradling his forehead, Thea her cheek, and Diggle his mouth. They were all rendered speechless by Barry's new intel after his escape from the Dominators' ship brought him back to the S.T.A.R. Labs hanger.

"Do we have any idea how large the damage will be to the human population?" Iris asked, sitting with Felicity, Cisco, Caitlin, and H.R. at the computers.

Barry shook his head, opening his mouth but making no noise except a universal "I have no idea" grunt. Oliver raised his head from his hand to respond instead. "If it's strong enough to take out all the metahumans on the planet, we can probably assume the casualties will be massive, meta or no meta."

"And you said this metabomb will be coming from outer space?" Thea asked.

Barry nodded. "I don't know where on Earth they plan to drop it, though."

"It could literally be anywhere," Cisco chimed in, frustrated. "While you were abducted, our satellites picked up Dominator ships coming into orbit all around the globe." He punched a few commands into his computer, and the screens in the hanger lit up with red alert symbols distributed across a world map. "Some of the ships broke atmosphere and are hovering over most of the world's major cities, but a lot of them are still up in space. Almost feels like we're caught in some giant net."

"ARGUS is trying to coordinate the world's air forces to defend us, but governments are at least trying to evacuate the cities before the fighting starts," Felicity added.

Barry ran his hands through his hair as he looked at the screens Cisco brought up, his brain overloading at the sheer impossibility of the task they faced. He may be the fastest man alive, but he couldn't cover the entire Earth all at the same time by himself. "This is going to be bad," he muttered.

"What are they waiting for?" Cisco wondered. "With that many ships, they could go all 'Missile Command' on us and blow everything up."

"Maybe their ships are strictly nonviolent?" H.R. asked hopefully. Everyone in the hanger turned their heads and looked at him skeptically. "What?" H.R. asked defensively, swerving his head around the room. "It's possible!"

"Whether they have weapons or not, we have another problem," Oliver pointed out. "Any of those ships may have Dominator soldiers that they'll deploy."

"We can't possibly cover every city in the world," Caitlin pointed out.

"No," Oliver agreed. "No, we can't. We're just going to have to hope the world's militaries can mobilize fast enough. For now, we should keep an eye on our own backyard." He turned his head to Barry. "The Dominators knew to come here to abduct you, and they consider you one of their biggest threats. It wouldn't surprise me if Central City was high on their list of places to demolish."

Barry scratched the back of his head. "That's possible, but these are aliens, Ollie. How can we possibly guess what they're thinking?"

"We can't," Oliver replied, "but we need to take some action. Thea and I will go into Central City and keep watch over the alien ship hovering there. Dig can stay to coordinate with Lyla and ARGUS, and you stay ready for when we learn more about the metabomb. You're the only one fast enough to respond."

"How will that help?" Barry asked, looking helplessly at him and the rest of the team. "I run really fast. I'm not a bomb diffuser."

"Figure something out," Oliver ordered, his no-nonsense attitude kicking in as he and Thea grabbed their gear. "You escaped an alien abduction. I'm sure something will come to you."

"Hold on." Diggle raised a hand, speaking for the first time. "Are we just going to ignore the fact that _Barry changed the timeline_?" Barry's recap of his abduction inevitably included his admittance of Flashpoint to all the Star City residents.

"One problem at a time, Dig," Oliver replied.

"I had a _daughter_ , Oliver," Diggle shot back. "I'm supposed to just let that be?"

"Barry made a mistake, and he'll have to answer for that mistake, but for now, one problem at a time," Oliver repeated. With that, he and Thea headed out of the hanger.

Given that rather unsatisfactory answer, Diggle shot Barry a glance that was part accusatory, part incredulity. Barry wanted to say something, anything, to convey how sorry he was, but before he could, Diggle stalked away.

Barry turned to the computers and stared at Felicity, who knew Diggle better than most. He held up his hands a little at either side, his question clear. _What should I do?_

She shrugged.

…

Mere hours later, it was time to improvise.

"What's that?" Iris asked, panicked as they all heard a frantic alarm going off.

"That," Felicity stated with a matching level of panic, "is a really, really big object falling to Earth really, really fast."

"The metabomb," Cisco muttered.

Caitlin snapped her head to Diggle urgently. "Can ARGUS stop it? The air force?"

Diggle shook his head helplessly, staring at the screen. "Caitlin, that's a giant bomb. We can't just shoot it."

"It's projected to land on Central City!" Felicity cried. "Evacuations aren't even close to being done!"

"How long?" H.R. asked.

"Minutes, at best," Felicity replied.

Everyone's heads turned to Barry, eyes desperate for a solution. In fact, he had come up with a last ditch option in his head over the past couple hours. Unfortunately, Iris wasn't going to like it.

"I think I can buy some time," Barry admitted, looking at Iris, "but we're going to need Wally."

Iris immediately shook her head. "Barry, he just got his powers. He's not ready."

"I agree with you, but we're out of options."

"What exactly did you have in mind?" Caitlin asked.

"We run under the bomb and hold it up with a wind funnel, just like I did when Magenta tried to drop that tanker on the hospital."

"Barry, that thing is, like, ten times more massive than the tanker," Cisco pointed out. "At least. It's going to be way, way harder to hold up."

"That's why I need Wally's help. Between the two of us, we might have a chance."

"And then what?" Caitlin asked. "You'll both be trapped under it, running figure eights trying to keep it up."

Barry shrugged helplessly. "You'll have to figure out something. Worst-case scenario, we buy time to finish evacuations, and then…well," he said, shooting a glance at Diggle, "we might have to make a call on shooting down the bomb. Suffer the consequences."

"Even if the evacuations finish, if the Dominators aren't bluffing, no metahuman is safe once that thing blows," H.R. pointed out. "Especially you and Wally."

"And that is why I'm hoping you all can find another solution," Barry replied. "At least this way, we have a chance to save the rest of humanity." Looking around the hanger, he could tell precisely no one liked this idea, but also precisely no one offered a better alternative. He made one last plea to Iris. "I'll do everything I can to keep him safe, Iris," Barry told her. "Even if I have to hold the thing up myself so he can get away, I'll do whatever it takes to make sure Wally gets out of this."

He saw, with painful familiarity, the look of trepidation on her face she always wore whenever she had to see him off into yet another dangerous situation, but to her credit, she pulled herself together quickly. "You'll both make it out of there. We'll think of something, Barry," Iris said confidently, though whether it was for his benefit or her own he couldn't be sure. "Go save our city. Wally'll meet you there."

Barry nodded, looking solemnly around the hanger. Felicity looked several degrees more alarmed than Iris and Caitlin, but that was probably because the two women were far more used to worrying about him on a regular basis and had learned how to manage it better. H.R. couldn't quite meet his eyes, but his nervous energy showed in the incessant tapping of his drumstick on anything and everything around him, including other people.

In Diggle, he saw a grudging respect. He was still clearly angry over the consequences of Flashpoint on his own life, but he also seemed able to maintain a soldier's perspective, aware of the risk Barry was taking. Barry had been incredibly selfish to not consider the effects of changing the timeline on other people's lives, but now, in putting his life on the line to help his team and help civilians get to safety, he was proving to Diggle his commitment to righting his wrongs any way he could.

Cisco's eyes were the hardest to read. His animosity towards Barry due to the death of his brother was still there, but Barry saw, or rather hoped, there was a mixture of other feelings dampening his anger. Concern for his friend's well-being. Respect for Barry's potential sacrifice to ensure the lives of normal humans. Understanding that Barry was doing everything he could to atone for his mistake with Flashpoint.

Stepping back, Barry pulled his mask over his head. Unable to think of anything else to say, he gave a little shake of his head. "Here we go."

He left the hanger in a burst of yellow lightning.

December, 2016 (Invasion)

Rip Hunter leaned back in the pilot's seat of the Waverider, unused to the current level of quiet his crew was experiencing. The timeline had maintained a constant stream of crises, emergencies, and general "screw the Waverider" events that had kept everyone on their toes for months since they had defeated Vandal Savage, but now it was acting positively serene, enabling the timeship to cruise through the Temporal Zone leisurely and unmolested.

It was enough to make him deeply suspicious.

Much had changed since that pivotal victory over the time-traveling despot. Kendra and Carter had departed the team to a well-deserved life of peace, and the rest of the crew carried on maintaining the integrity of the timeline in the absence of the Time Masters until an expected foray into 1942 revealed the danger of a new threat. The "Legion of Doom," as Raymond was fond of calling them, was comprised of the speedster Eobard Thawne, the former League of Assassins leader Malcom Merlyn, and the ageless wielder of evil magic Damien Darkh. Their pursuit of the pieces of the Spear of Destiny, an artifact Rip had broken so that the pieces could be separated and fastidiously hidden across time, had forced the crew of the Waverider into a frantic race to keep the powerful item out of evil's hands.

In the end they succeeded, largely due to clever breadcrumbs Rip had left to help himself in the event he needed to locate the pieces of the spear again. The crew handed the Legion of Doom a decisive defeat, and in the process they added a new friend to their crew, Amaya Jiwe, a former member of 1942's Justice Society of America. They had since returned to policing the timeline for new time aberrations, doing so well that they had achieved a sort of calm.

It was, of course, at this point the natural order of things rocked the Waverider with a massive shockwave.

 _Well, that didn't last long_ , Rip thought ruefully, checking his controls as the rest of his crew scrambled up from below decks.

"Don't tell me…" Sara began.

"I'm afraid so, Ms. Lance," Rip replied. "Another time quake." The last time they had felt a time quake, and indeed the first time _any_ of them had felt a time quake, was when a nuclear bomb blew up New York City in 1942, securing victory for the Axis powers in World War II.

"Can't the timeline keep itself together for five minutes?" Jax complained, rushing to the console in the center of the bridge. "Gideon, what happened?"

"Just a moment, Mr. Jackson. I am tracing the source of the quake."

"This better be good," Mick grumbled. "I almost beat my record."

"Record? For what?" Ray asked.

"Donuts eaten in three minutes," Mick replied. "I was at twenty-one!"

"That's disgusting," Amaya said.

"That's commitment," Mick retorted.

"I have the results," Gideon chimed in.

"Oh, thank goodness," Stein breathed, unwilling to listen to more of Mick's edible conquests. "What have you found?"

"The source of the quake is Central City, December 2016."

A chill swept across the crew. "Wh-What?" Stein spluttered. "December 2016? That's now! How is that possible? What happened?"

"I am sorry, Professor Stein," Gideon apologized. "That is all the information I have."

"What do you mean, Gideon?" Rip cut in impatiently. "How is that everything?"

"I mean, that is all the information I have," Gideon repeated, sounding remarkably testy for an AI interface. "I am unable to determine anything else."

"Why is that, Gideon?" Sara interjected, careful to be less confrontational than Rip. "You've never had problems scanning a time aberration before."

"There is some sort of interference surrounding this event," Gideon explained. "Without going to the exact time and place, I'm afraid I can tell you little else."

"Then let's go!" Jax almost shouted. "We have to stop this, whatever it is!"

"I agree, we must timejump to Central City immediately!" Stein joined in. Neither had to remind the crew that the duo had family in Central City.

Rip exhaled slowly, starting at the one line of information that Gideon was able to post on the central console. Never had he gone into a situation with so little information, and the very fact that Gideon was unable to assess the time quake set off alarm bells in his head. Investigating was going to be exceedingly dangerous.

 _A Time Master's work is never done_ , Rip thought to himself, _even when Time Masters don't exist anymore_.

"Very well," he said, straightening up. "Central City it is. However, we will jump to November 2016 instead of December 2016. Should give us an opportunity to assess the situation and hopefully head it off." He strode over to the pilot's chair. "Everyone strap in. This…should be interesting," he finished, at the same time punching forward the lever to time jump.

…

Things went wrong from the word "interesting."

Instead of feeling the rush of acceleration preceding a time jump, the ship felt like it had run into a soft barrier, almost like a giant elastic net was stretching against the Waverider, trying to push it back.

"Gideon, what's happening?" Rip demanded, the ship beginning to vibrate violently under the strain. He could hear his various knick-knacks falling to the floor in his ready room at the back of the bridge, and it was a struggle to sound dignified and in control with his voice trembling as if he were in a high-powered massage chair.

"There appears to be some sort of chrono-spatial dampening field around our destination. It is throwing off both temporal and geographical navigation," Gideon explained in a voice far, far too calm given the alarming creaks emanating throughout the Waverider.

"Can you compensate?" Rip yelled, sparks flying from various consoles as the lights began to flicker.

"I am attempting to, Captain," she replied, and for a few terrifying seconds, the crew heard nothing from Gideon as creaks and strains starting turning into tears and buckling. Finally, without warning, the ship shot forward, throwing everyone back hard against their seats, and the Waverider suddenly emerged in the middle of a cloud.

Multiple wet splats sounded behind Rip, and he silently admitted to himself that he felt like doing the same. It had been a very long time since he'd experienced a time jump so rough, and the fact that a quarter of his crew was currently emptying lunch onto the floor was no surprise.

He took a deep breath to settle himself, then said, "Gideon. Status."

"We have arrived above Central City, December 2016."

"I said we would go to November 2016, Gideon."

"I am aware of this, Captain," Gideon replied, "but as I noted during our perilous entry, the dampening field disrupted all navigation. This was the closest I could manage."

"Very well," Rip sighed. "Let's hope we're not too late." With that, he piloted the Waverider downwards, directly for Central City. Within a few seconds, they had broken through the cloud cover, obtaining a full view of the city. More than a few gasps filled the silence as Rip looked grimly at the scene.

Central City was in chaos. The airspace over the city was swarming with aircraft engaging in aerial dogfights, with many errant shots tearing up the taller buildings that dotted the skyline. The fight, as best as Rip could tell, was between 2016-appropriate aircraft utilized by the United States air force and strange X-shaped spaceships unlike any design he had ever seen. Down on the ground, Rip could vaguely make out some movement, movement so strange and unnatural that it could not possibly be attributed to humans, but mostly what he saw were fires and debris.

For a few moments, everyone on the Waverider sat in stunned silence, unable to process the havoc unfolding below. It was down to Rip to snap them out of it and take action, for as it turned out, it was not just the timeline at stake for this mission. For most of the crew, Rip knew, this had become personal.

"Right," he exhaled crisply, snapping up his seat restraints and swiveling his chair around. "Gideon, bring the weapons system online and prepare the Waverider for battle. It appears Central City needs our help," he said, striding over to the center console. Ray, Sara, and Amaya snapped up their restraints as well and dashed off the bridge, rushing to change into their combat gear. Stein, Jax, and Mick joined Rip at the center console to observe the situation.

"Gideon, scan the city and report."

Now in the proper place and time, Gideon's information was coming at a much faster clip. "Central City, and indeed cities around the globe, are being attacked by an alien race," Gideon began. "Intelligence from military reports is referring to them as the 'Dominators.'"

"That's not subtle at all," Jax muttered.

"It appears Central City has been largely evacuated, but the aliens have deployed ground forces. Local police and paramilitary troops belonging to the organization known as ARGUS are fighting back as best they can."

On the center console, Gideon projected a three-dimensional map of Central City and was highlighting areas of intense fighting. Rip noticed an extremely large object seemingly hanging in midair in the relative center of the city and used the console to highlight it. "Gideon, what's that?"

"That," Gideon began, "is an explosive device designed by the aliens to wipe out all metahuman life on Earth."

"A bomb, Gideon?" Stein asked, faintly.

"In essence yes, Professor Stein," Gideon replied. "One that, while specific to metahumans, is also projected to cause additional millions in casualties among the normal human population. It is currently being kept off the ground to prevent its detonation."

"What? How is that possible?" Rip marveled. He reached into the three-dimensional map and zoomed in on the location of the metabomb. The map shifted into a live feed of the situation, courtesy of the Waverider's futuristic cameras. The metabomb was indeed being held up in the air by a giant wind funnel, like a propeller had been stuck into the ground and was blowing air straight up. At the bottom of the wind funnel, streaks of yellow light could be seen.

"Barry," Jax whispered.

"Not just Mr. Allen, I think," Rip replied. When Jax and Stein looked at him, he tilted his head. "2016 was also the year Wally West became active as a speedster. Given that this is already December, it's a good wager he's lending his speed to assist as well."

"You just know that off the top of your head?" Mick asked, skeptically.

"Speedsters and Time Masters have a…complicated relationship," Rip hedged. "One I have no interest in explaining at the moment. Now, it appears that this bomb is the focal point of the battle in Central City. Most of the air force fighter jets seem focused on keeping the alien spacecraft from hitting either the bomb or the speedsters. And if I'm not mistaken…," Rip trailed off, catching a strange blur of color and zooming in even closer to find a mass of Dominator aliens closing in on two hooded figures, one green and one red. "Yes, it appears Mr. and Ms. Queen are defending the speedsters on the ground."

"By themselves? They'll never survive!" Stein exclaimed.

"No, they very likely will not," Rip said, straightening up as Ray, Sara, and Amaya sprinted back onto the bridge, all ready for battle. "Not unless we intervene. You three were listening over intercoms, yes?"

Sara nodded. "What's the plan?"

"There's no time to land and take off again, so I will fly the Waverider as low as I can. Ray and Amaya will fly down with Sara and Mick to assist the Queens' defense of the speedsters. I will then take the Waverider back up and try to divert the alien fire away from the city."

"What about us?" Jax asked, indicating himself and Stein.

"You two, I'm afraid," Rip sighed, "will have the hardest job of all."

…

 _About damn time_.

Oliver had never been fully sure when and how he would go in life, but he sure as hell was not going to be satisfied with getting skewered by a Dominator claw while knocked on his back on the ground.

Thus, when the withered alien standing above him had its neck snapped by a pair of white boots flying into its face, he was grateful for the save, but also slightly aggrieved that life would present him with such a death.

"Miss me?" Sara grinned at him after landing gracefully on her feet, while behind her the Dominator she had kicked bounced down a set of stone steps. Oliver took her offered hand and got to his feet as Ray, who had apparently been the one to bodily hurl Sara at their enemy, cut off his engines and landed next to them.

Oliver was more relieved than he could ever express, but given the situation, he couldn't entirely drop his gruff demeanor. "You're late," he grunted.

"It's funny," Ray mused conversationally, glancing skywards at the aerial dogfights happening above them. "Traffic in Central City is a lot worse than I remembered."

Oliver wanted to retort, but the Dominators he had been fending off on his side of the swirling vortex that was Central City's resident speedsters were once again regrouping, and he got down to business. "We need to keep them away from Barry and Wally. Thea needs help, too." He had to yell to be heard over the cacophony of wind Barry and Wally were generating.

"We sent reinforcements to her side as well," Sara assured him, even as she turned to face the oncoming Dominators with a twirl of her bo staff, "and we've got a plan to help our two Flashes as well."

"What are you going to do?" Oliver asked, nocking a new arrow to face the oncoming alien horde. Ray pointed his left energy blaster at the Dominators while using his right hand to point upwards. Looking up, Oliver saw a man wreathed in flame angling through the mess of fighting in the skies above towards the metabomb. Firestorm.

"What's he doing?" he asked as he shot an exploding arrow, blasting a pair of aliens into charred pieces and slowing the Dominator advance as they attempted to close the gap between themselves and the three of them.

"He's going to transmute the bomb. Turn it into something harmless," Ray explained, scorching a hole through an alien's chest after it had gotten too close.

"He can do that? With something that big?"

"We're about to find out," Sara quipped, chucking a knife at another advancing Dominator before splitting her staff into batons. "All we have to do is hold out until then."

At that moment, the regrouped aliens finally closed the gap and were upon them, screaming for blood.

"Simple," Oliver muttered.

…

Rip had never been more disgruntled about doing a good job as he was right now.

With guns blazing and the fanciest piloting he had ever done, if he did say so himself, Rip was using the Waverider to peel alien attention off the metabomb and the metahumans currently trying to disarm it. Under different circumstances, he would be using the ship's tractor beam to help keep the bomb from hitting the ground, but with so much aerial chaos, the best he could hope for was to thin the alien ships and pray that the two speedsters could hold their wind funnel long enough for Firestorm to transmute the device. Considering his ship was far and away the most advanced one fighting for humanity, it was quite simple convincing the aliens that he represented the biggest threat, which was good news as far as the metahumans below were concerned.

Unfortunately, it was bad news as far as the Waverider was concerned.

"Captain, structural integrity is failing," Gideon informed him, again with the calm demeanor entirely incongruous with the exploding consoles, showers of sparks, and billows of smoke now enveloping the bridge.

"Time to complete systems failure?" he asked tersely, while performing yet another hard bank to avoid Dominator fire. He couldn't cover Firestorm or the Flashes much longer.

"At the current rate of damage, ninety seconds."

"Very well," Rip acknowledged grimly. "Gideon, you've prepared your emergency mainframe?"

"Of course."

"Good. Begin transferring your program," he ordered. "And bring remote navigation controls online as soon as possible. I will speak with you soon. Hopefully."

"Transfer in progress. Good luck, Captain." With that, Gideon's voice cut out.

Rip executed a dive to simultaneously avoid some approaching alien ships while bringing others in line with his targeting systems, though admittedly he wasn't even sure his weapons would fire anymore. As he idly wondered what ridiculous stunt he would have to pull to extricate himself out of this, he opened a comlink to his teammates. "Firestorm, so sorry to rush you, but if you could save all our lives in the next ninety seconds, that would be ideal."

…

Barry couldn't keep this up much longer.

His lungs were on fire. His nose was bleeding. His throat was raw from sucking in oxygen. His legs were in agony.

Wally was faring worse than him, his clothes all in tatters from not yet having the benefit of a supersuit. He had been eager and excited at first to use his newly-acquired speed, but now, after an interminable amount of time running the same figure-eight pattern, desperately holding up a bomb threatening their very existence, he simply trailed in Barry's wake, struggling to keep up.

Glancing up, Barry could tell the metabomb was getting lower and lower. He and Wally just didn't have the strength to keep this up forever, and the promise he made to Iris, to make sure Wally got out of this alive, echoed in his mind. He had just started to make grim estimates in his head of how long he could hold the bomb up by himself, giving Wally precious seconds to get away, when Felicity blared into the communication link nestled in his ear. "We have a plan, Barry! Just hang on!"

"Make…fast…" Barry struggled, so out of breath he could barely speak. "Can't…much…longer…"

"Just hold on! The Legends are here!"

 _About damn time_ , Barry thought.

"Firestorm's going to transmute the bomb. As soon as he does, the other Legends will clear out. You and Wally just need to grab Oliver and Thea and get out!"

"Got…it…" Barry wheezed, although truthfully he didn't get it and just trusted the others had a plan. He hoped Wally was listening over his own comm link, but when he glanced back, Wally's head was down, so exhausted as he was. Gathering his strength, he shouted one final plea. "Come on, Wally! We got this!" Wally raised his head in response, a new look of grim determination on his face.

What felt like hours later, but in reality was likely only seconds, Felicity chimed in over the comm link again. "They did it! Go! Go! Go!"

Immediately, Barry and Wally streaked out of the figure-eight groove they had carved out in the pavement. Barry saw a smear of green and grabbed the person covered in it, while out of the corner of his eye he saw Wally do the same to a person hooded in red. They ran with their charges up a hill mere blocks away, to a popular urban park in the middle of Central City, where they then dropped out of superspeed and promptly collapsed.

Wally, on all fours, began vomiting into the grass, completely oblivious to everything else around him, but Barry found himself propped up by Oliver, who had been quick enough to catch him before he hit the ground. "Barry, are you okay?!" he demanded.

 _Do I look okay?_ , Barry wondered sarcastically as he sat on the grass, leaning against Oliver and desperately sucking in air while simultaneously coughing his lungs out, both nostrils leaking blood. Instead of answering, he half turned where he sat, looking back the way they had come, and if he had had any breath left, it would have been promptly taken away.

What had been an alien metabomb hanging in the air was now crystal-clear waves and splashes drenching the square where he, Wally, Oliver, and Thea had made their stand. Jax and Stein had somehow managed to turn that entire alien monstrosity into pure water. Even better, the Dominators Oliver and Thea had been holding off were unable to escape in time and were all now fighting the deluge, desperately trying to stay afloat.

As he watched the aliens struggle, the rest of the Legends, some with their own teammates in their arms, flew above their heads and landed next to them on the grass. He idly wondered where Snart was, and who the woman wearing a necklace looking exactly like Mari McCabe's was, but he had no energy for questions.

"Firestorm," Sara said, " _that_ was impressive."

In response, Firestorm disappeared in a brief flash of flame, only to reemerge as the separated forms of Jax and Stein, who both promptly took a knee, looking almost as exhausted as himself and Wally.

" _That_ ," Jax replied, "was ridiculous."

"Agreed," Stein concurred. "Nevertheless, it appears we were successful."

"In stopping the metabomb, sure," Thea pointed out, "but I'm not sure if that water's really going to take out the Dominators. And," she continued, looking around at their group, "we aren't exactly in fighting shape."

"We'll have to cover your escape then," Ray said, stepping forward. Pointing at himself, Sara, Mick, and the woman with the totem necklace, he continued, "We're a little bit fresher. We can hold them off while the rest of you get to safety."

"Don't bother," Mick drawled, looking up at the sky.

"What?" Sara asked.

In response, Mick pointed towards the sky, and Barry saw some sort of futuristic ship barreling on a collision course. Towards them.

"What is that?" Oliver asked apprehensively, seemed to agree with Barry's guess that the ship was aimed right where they were stationed.

"That's the Waverider," Stein explained in surprise. "It's taken heavy damage." Given the parts trailing behind the ship on loose cables, the multiple plumes of smoke belching out of various craters in the hull, and the drunken listing of the ship as it flew through the sky, Barry had already made that assessment for himself.

"Am I crazy, or is that thing headed straight for us?" Thea asked, panic creeping into her voice.

"You're not," Sara confirmed baldly. "Everyone get down!"

Barry and the rest of the heroes hit the grass, flattening themselves as much as humanly possible as the Waverider, smoking and sparking, sailed over them, so close that both Oliver's and Thea's hoods were blown off. Scrambling back up onto all fours, Barry watched as the Waverider made a beeline for the Dominators, still struggling in the water several blocks down. With an almighty crash, the Waverider slammed into the midst of the aliens, prompting a series of high-pitched screams and shrieks as the Dominators tried to avoid the enormous projectile. A second later, the ship exploded in a fiery inferno of light and heat, forcing Barry to hold up a hand to shield his eyes. The alien shrieks went silent.

The heroes slowly gathered to survey the scene from their vantage point in the urban park. Steam rose from the seared and blistered streets, water that had been superheated by the Waverider's demise. The ship itself was a pile of scrap metal, no longer recognizable as any inhabitable mode of transport. The square was a mess of rubble and debris, and visible crack lines were in all of the surrounding building faces. Perhaps most importantly, there was no sign of alien movement.

As his breath slowly, finally, came back to him, Barry raised his head and looked around, noticing the Legends seemed especially quiet and distraught. It then occurred to him that there was probably someone still on that ship, piloting its final course. They had just lost a teammate. He lowered his head again, wanting to give them some space, but at that moment his comm link blared to life, and he heard Diggle. "Hold tight everyone, we're locking onto your position."

 _Locking onto our position? With what?_ Barry's thought was soon answered by a gust of wind coming from above as a pair of ARGUS helicopters lowered themselves into position above the park and dropped rope ladders. As they looked up, they saw Diggle waving at them urgently from one helicopter to climb the ladders. From the other, a bearded man wearing a long brown coat surveyed them down below.

"Rip!" Sara called out, in shock and obvious relief. Rip responded with a smug salute, tapping two fingers to his forehead.

 _Rip Hunter_ , Barry remembered. The Time Master had come back through the timeline to help them save Central City. _Great, now I owe him a favor_ , Barry thought ruefully.

…

Having finally regained some breath into his lungs, and now flying among the rooftops of Central City, only now did Barry appreciate that the skies were suddenly calmer. Looking left and right, the only aircraft he saw now were U.S. air force. There were no alien ships in sight.

"Did we win?" he asked Diggle.

Diggle shook his head. "The Dominator ships called back their remaining ground troops and retreated after the Waverider smashed into them, but they're still maintaining position in low Earth orbit. It's the same story around the world."

Oliver nodded towards the helicopter flying beside them, the one onto which Rip and the Legends had boarded. "How the hell did Rip end up on an ARGUS helicopter?"

Diggle gave an exasperated shrug, as if he had had it up to his eyeballs in ridiculous superhero-related shenanigans and was finally sick of it all. "He waved us down from a rooftop as we approached. Apparently he bailed from the ship and managed to pilot it remotely on its collision course."

"Oh come on, that's just cheating," Thea quipped.

"I don't really believe it, either," Diggle agreed. "As soon as we got word a plan was in place to take out the metabomb, we scrambled helicopters to evacuate you all. We didn't expect to pick up a—what did he say? 'Time Master'?—on the way."

Barry leaned back against the wall of the helicopter, unable to muster any more energy. It was Wally who posed the simple question he was thinking. "So what now?"

"Felicity and Cisco are working with ARGUS to figure out what the Dominators are still doing up there," Diggle replied, pointing upwards to indicate the alien ships in orbit. "We're heading back to the S.T.A.R. Labs hanger. Now that the Legends are here, we may have a chance to alter our strategy."

That sounded good enough to Barry, who now closed his eyes and felt a wave of exhaustion creeping in. Before he completely succumbed, Oliver knelt in front of him and gripped his shoulder. "You did it, Barry. You and Wally kept the metabomb from exploding."

"All in a day's work," Barry muttered, too tired to feel much pride yet. He noticed Oliver giving him a small smile. "What?"

"You made a difference," Oliver told him, simply. "You saved people. In a flash."

Barry chuckled, remembering a conversation on a rooftop in Starling City, seemingly a lifetime ago. "Is this your way of saying 'I told you so'?"

"It's my way of saying 'Thank you'," Oliver replied.

…

 _Author's notes:_

 _A few dialogue lines are taken directly from the DC's Legends of Tomorrow part of the crossover (2x07, "Invasion!")._

 _The crossover episodes went from Nov. 28 to Dec. 1, so that's why there's a shift from November to December._


	4. Chapter 4

Present, 2056 (Occupation)

"What did Oliver tell you, before he died?" Felicity asked.

Barry leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. "He said we were right. The Dominator's staging area in Central City was a power station the whole time. That's how they've kept the field up."

"So if we take it out…"

"Then maybe this can all end."

The two of them lapsed into silence, feeling an increased weight on their shoulders. So many friends had been lost. Nearly all of their loved ones were gone. Forty years of endless fighting, of struggling to free their home from the aliens who had taken it from them, had weighed them down. Barry, Felicity, and Oliver had banded together as their allies dwindled, holding each other close as they tried to keep up the fight, but now the three of them had become two, and the weight was crushing.

"Did he find a weakness?" Felicity asked after a few moments.

Barry nodded. "All that time infiltrating the labor camp paid off. There's a way through their security. He told me how to navigate it."

"It can't be that simple," Felicity retorted.

"There're still a bunch of guards. I could use a distraction. A big one," he added. He paused for a couple moments, then sighed heavily before saying, "I think we need to pay a visit to the Bunker."

Felicity let out a humorless laugh. "He gave up a long time ago. He's not going to help us."

Barry shrugged. "I have to give it a shot."

"I doubt he'll respond very well to seeing you again."

"Well, maybe he'll shoot me. Then all my worries go away."

January, 2016 (Prelude)

"You look so innocent."

"Oh, geez—!" Barry practically leaped out of his skin as he whipped his head around to the door of his lab. Though he could have sworn no one was there a split second before, now there stood a stoic, bearded figure in a long beige coat, leaning against the arch of the doorway and staring at him with an almost quizzical look in his eyes.

"Don't do that!" Barry exclaimed, settling back into his chair and putting his hand over his eyes momentarily to hide his surprise.

"My apologies," the man replied sardonically, showing that he was not sorry at all.

"I'm sorry, do I know you?" Barry asked, exasperated. On top of sneaking up on him, this guy seemed intent on giving him attitude.

"No, I'm afraid not," the man replied, his clipped East London accent providing a rather odd juxtaposition to the vaguely Wild West-like nature of his clothes. He then corrected, "Well, not yet, in any case, but I do know all about you. In my line of work, speedsters are rather infamous, after all."

Upon hearing the word "speedsters," Barry tensed, realizing that this man somehow knew that he was the Flash. He got up from his chair slowly. "What do you want?"

"Relax, Mr. Allen," the man said. "I'm not here to cause you any trouble. I'm just here to give you a little advance warning."

Barry shook his head. "I don't understand."

The man explained, "I am in the process of recruiting several associates of yours. Mr. Raymond Palmer. Ms. Kendra Saunders. Mr. Leonard Snart—"

"Snart? What could you possibly want with him?"

"That is none of your concern," the man retorted testily. "All you need to know is that they will be carrying out an assignment and will be unavailable to assist in any of your own antics around Central City."

Barry threw his arms out to either side, quickly getting fed up with the abrasive and, frankly, borderline hostile treatment he was receiving. "Who the hell are you, man?"

The man sighed, acting as if he were dealing with an intentionally obtuse child. "My name is Rip Hunter, Mr. Allen. I am a Time Master, and it is my responsibility to maintain the integrity of the past, present, and future."

"A Time Master," Barry repeated skeptically. "What, I'm just supposed to believe that's a thing?"

"Why shouldn't you?" Rip replied. "If I'm not mistaken, this is 2016, which means you've already made multiple forays into the past, not to mention waged battle with a speedster from the future. Eobard Thawne, was it not?" Barry's fists clenched, feeling vulnerable at how much this man knew about him. "Is it so hard to believe there are others with the power to travel through time? That there are others with a greater sense of respect for the timeline than you speedsters?" Rip finished, snidely.

"Don't lump me with him," Barry growled. "I'm nothing like him."

Rip held up his hands in a vaguely arrogant surrender. "I'm not here to debate the point with you. All I came to say is that you will find some of your friends unavailable for the foreseeable future. I believe Mr. Palmer and Ms. Sara Lance have already conferred with some of your allies in Starling City. Or is it Star City now?" he asked, looking away from Barry and tilting his head. "That change never made much sense in the history books."

Barry sensed Rip trying to distract him and was having none of it. "How do you know so much about me? Why are you really here?"

"I am here to tell you that your friends will, for all intents and purposes, disappear for the next few months, and the absolute worst thing you can do is start mucking up the timeline trying to locate them," Rip replied, brusquely. "As for why I know so much, it is my business as a Time Master to be aware of the presence of speedsters in any time period I enter. Time and again, you lot have believed yourselves above the laws of time and space, and for my mission to succeed, I need you to keep your nose in 2016 Central City where it belongs."

As much as Barry wanted to believe he was just listening to the ranting of some homeless guy who had gotten into the CCPD, he knew that the details Rip had already rattled off about his life were fairly strong evidence in favor of this wild tale being true. That didn't make him trust Rip any more. "How do I know you're not just kidnapping all my friends?"

Rip pinched the bridge of his nose in exasperation. "If that were my plan, why would I come here and tell you that?" he replied. "I assure you, they are all leaving of their own free will. Fairly soon, in fact," he said, looking at his watch. "If you still don't believe me, you can confirm with the Green Arrow, though I suppose he is simply 'Oliver Queen' to you," he finished, smirking.

Barry's head continued to spin at all this new information, but Rip was clearly ready to leave, so he grasped on the only question he could. "What did you mean that I looked so innocent?"

"That," Rip sighed, averting his eyes as he straightened his sleeves, preparing to leave, "is a very complicated answer." When Rip glanced up again, Barry couldn't put his finger on the word to describe the look he was getting. There was cold dislike in those eyes, absolutely. There was also something else, like Rip was dying to tear into him but was, for some reason, holding back. A lot. When he spoke again, Barry could almost hear the inner conflict as he restrained himself. "Suffice it to say, the progress of history does not occur without several time-related incursions from the Flash. Some say you were a savior. Some say you were a menace. To me, you're a pain in the arse."

"Thanks," Barry muttered sarcastically.

"I admit, in coming here I was curious to see you in your early days, catch any hint of the meddlesome nuisance you'll become," Rip continued condescendingly, returning to his attitude of unsubtle disrespect. "However, given that my mission is currently not in the history books, my primary objective is to make myself clear that I cannot tolerate your troublemaking in this case. Are we understood?"

 _No, we are damn well_ _ **not**_ _understood_ , Barry wanted to bite back, but unfortunately, he had to admit that the targeted facts Rip had dropped about his life had rattled him. His accidental trips into the past during his fights with Mark Mardon and Vandal Savage. Eobard Thawne. Oliver as the Green Arrow. He was at a significant disadvantage, and so all he felt safe doing was nodding curtly.

"Good," Rip replied. "In that case, I wish you good day, Mr. Allen. Hopefully neither one of us has reason to contact the other again." With that and a swish of his coat, Rip Hunter was gone.

That was bizarre, Barry thought dazedly. Once he finally got his wits about him, his first step was to pull out his phone to call Oliver.

December, 2016 (Invasion)

Rip slammed his hand into the table in front of him. "You speedsters are _unbelievable_."

With everyone gathered at the S.T.A.R. Labs hanger, the Legends were now getting caught up in the events that led to their detection of the time quake, and Rip discovered that _of course_ it was because of a speedster. Barry Allen had gone back in time to interfere with the actions of Eobard Thawne, thus producing the alternate "Flashpoint" timeline. Inevitably, he realized his mistake and tried to put things back in the way they were, but as Rip frequently observed, speedsters never appreciated the irreparable damage their actions had, not just on time itself, but on the people who share the timeline with them.

"I'm sorry. I'm trying to make up for what I did," Barry began somberly.

"Yes, well I suppose since you're _sorry_ we can all just forget this ever happened," Rip snapped. "Shall we tell the Dominators to go home then?"

"Hey, back off," Oliver said angrily. "This isn't his fault."

"What? I'm sorry, do you _really_ believe that?" Rip retorted sarcastically, turning on the archer. "Haven't we _just_ established that the Dominators came to this Earth because they became aware of his changes to the timeline? This is _entirely_ Mr. Allen's fault."

"Come on, Rip. He made a mistake," Jax said softly. "We made some pretty big ones when we were after Savage."

"Yes well, Mr. Jackson, the difference is that the rules, as they so often are, tend to be a bit different where speedsters are concerned."

"How so?" Stein asked.

"Because every individual speedster has the ability to change the timeline, when _two_ of them interact, the way Mr. Allen and Mr. Thawne did, the ripples throughout chronometric reality are widespread, with destructive and constructive interference occurring all throughout," Rip explained, with a sweeping gesture of his hand. "These changes are comprehensive, yes, but they are also far more nuanced than any normal time aberration, which is why the Waverider never detected the occurrence of Flashpoint, why we couldn't fix it."

"I…I didn't know," Barry began.

"No, you did not," Rip said snidely. "You didn't know. You didn't think, and now, it is because of you that Earth is in this mess."

"I'm not entirely sure that's true," Amaya joined in, with a hand at her chin and her other arm crossed over her chest. "I think maybe this was inevitable."

"What makes you say that?" Sara asked.

"Something this Dominator 'Superior' said, according to Barry," Amaya explained. "He said that sixty-five years ago, 'we became aware of the presence of metahumans on your planet'?"

Barry nodded. "Which doesn't make any sense, like I said. The particle accelerator accident was only three years ago."

Amaya shook her head. "Metahumans have been on Earth long before that. Sixty-five years ago would be 1952, when the Justice Society of America was still active." Blank stares from all of the non-Legends forced her to explain. "It was a secret organization of individuals tasked with covert missions for the U.S. government. Some of us were, as you call them now, metahumans."

"So metahumans have been on Earth since before the Central City accident?" Thea asked.

"Actually, that makes sense," Cisco chimed in. He pointed at Ray. "Remember the meta you and Oliver took down in Starling?"

"Oh yeah. Deathbolt," Ray remembered, smiling a little. He looked around the room. "I came up with the name," he added conversationally. No one had any response to that.

"Anyway," Cisco continued, "we thought Deathbolt got his powers from the particle accelerator, but it turns out he wasn't even in Central City when it exploded. Metahuman abilities might just be a natural course of human evolution."

"Fantastic," Caitlin muttered quietly.

"The point being?" Rip asked, pinching the bridge of his nose at all the attempts to direct blame from the obvious source: the speedster.

"The point being," Amaya replied, "that Barry may have drawn their attention, but the Dominators have been watching us since 1952. If metahuman powers are just a natural course of human evolution, as Cisco says, then if Barry's powers didn't provoke them, some other metahuman would have eventually. The Dominators were just looking for a reason."

"Which Mr. Allen gave them," Rip persisted.

"Yes, and he fully regrets it," Oliver said, still defensive against the Time Master. "But sooner or later, the Dominator problem would have happened, and it just so happens that it came sooner. So we should stop wasting time blaming each other and figure out how to fix this."

Rip looked angrily around the room and saw to his dismay that most of the opinions were against him on this matter. Truthfully, he knew internally that it was pointless directing so much ire at Barry, but certain feelings ran too deep. Sometimes history can't be forgotten. At present, however, he appeared to be outvoted.

"Very well, then," Rip grumbled, throwing up his hands in resignation. "If you and Mr. Allen are calling the shots, I won't get in the way." _Until I have to, that is_ , he thought to himself silently.

Oliver nodded curtly, acknowledging Rip's attempt at civility, and tension around the team dissipated slightly. It was in that moment that Felicity called out. "Oliver!" she said. "There's a message for you."

Oliver turned and jogged towards the computers where Felicity and the rest of the support team were working, and the group momentarily dispersed. A couple of the Legends, however, hung back to talk to Rip.

"He means well," Ray remarked to Rip. "Felicity used to talk about how different Barry and Oliver are in being heroes. The one thing you can always say about Barry is that his heart's in the right place."

"I can't say I blame him for what he did," Sara added. "Even knowing all the consequences of time travel, if I could run back in time to save Laurel…" She let the rest of her statement go unfinished.

"Yes, well," Rip huffed, "while it seems everyone in this time period is eager to make excuses for Mr. Allen, I simply hope he doesn't end up being the death of us all."

"Okay, _what_ is up with you about him?" Sara asked, exasperated. "It's like you're determined to hate him."

Rip hesitated, knowing he had to be careful. "That, Sara, is a _very_ long story," he hedged, "and regardless of our…history…there is a more immediate concern this 'Flashpoint' mess of his causes."

A pause. "I assume you're going to tell us?" Ray finally asked.

In response, Rip shook back the sleeve over his left arm to reveal a large wristband with a thin apparatus roughly the size of a smartphone strapped to it. It was the housing for Gideon's emergency mainframe into which she had transferred her programming and remote control over the Waverider prior to its crash. "Gideon, you were listening during our conference?"

"Of course, Captain," she replied, her face appearing on the screen.

"Given that information, where was the Waverider when Mr. Allen created Flashpoint?"

"Assuming the new timeline took effect the moment he returned to his present day, the Waverider was in the Temporal Zone when this occurred."

"As I feared," Rip muttered, powering down the Console.

"Mind filling us in?" Sara asked.

Rip worked his jaw, trying to figure out how best to explain. "Had we been in normal space and time when Flashpoint occurred, we would not even be aware any changes had occurred, but since we were in the Temporal Zone, we were shielded from its effects."

"So?" Ray asked. "Having that awareness doesn't sound so bad to me."

"Unfortunately, it is bad for _me_ ," Rip explained. "In 2166, when Vandal Savage was taking power, Dominators had no presence on Earth, which would imply that they were defeated in 2016, presumably with a huge subsequent cover-up."

"You're saying we're guaranteed to win this fight?"

"Maybe we _were_ , before Flashpoint occurred," Rip corrected, "but because we were in the Temporal Zone, all of our memories and experiences are from the timeline _before_ Mr. Allen changed it. Now there's no telling if my present in 2166 will come to pass."

Another little pause. "I'm sorry, what?" Sara finally asked, confusion evident on her face. Ray, however, seemed to be catching on.

"We went to 2166 to fight Savage in a futuristic society," Ray began, "a society that clearly had no Dominators. Flashpoint might have erased that future entirely."

"And because we, or more specifically, _I_ was in the Temporal Zone," Rip picked up, "I have no knowledge of this new timeline and now have no idea how the future will unfold." He waited to let that sink in slightly before adding, "Perhaps the Dominators _do_ defeat humanity in this timeline."

Sara cocked her head to the side, considering, then shook her head a tiny bit. "There are days I _really_ wish I hadn't gotten on that boat with Ollie."

…

"You're sure it's him?" Oliver asked.

"As sure as we can be. Same outfit, same weapons. He even had the throwing stars on him, and we verified that they were made with metal from your arrowheads," Curtis replied over the video call. "He didn't go without a fight, though. There were _many_ Dominator body parts around him. It was...intense."

"But he's dead? Prometheus is dead?" 

"Very. Three Dominator claws through the chest."

Oliver covered his face with his hands, unsure how to feel that his tormentor in Star City went down fighting their common alien foe. From the descriptions Curtis, René, and Rory were giving him over the call, it seems Star City hadn't experienced as massive an attack as Central City, but there had still been casualties and damages before the Dominators' not-very-reassuring retreat, and one of those casualties was causing a storm of mixed emotions inside him. He took a deep breath and asked the question he knew Curtis was expecting.

"Who was he?"

…

"We've got something," Felicity declared.

Rip turned his head to see Felicity beckoning to everyone inside the hanger to assemble around her, her eyes not bothering to move off her screen. As he gathered with the rest of the team around the computers, he noticed Oliver being a bit slow to follow, his face a mask of consternation.

"Are you alright, Mr. Queen?" he asked.

"Hmm?" Oliver replied, cleared distracted. "Oh. Yes, I'm fine. Just…had a loose end tied up in Star City." He didn't seem keen to share more, so Rip didn't press him.

"What'd you guys find?" Diggle asked, directing his question at Felicity and Cisco.

In response, Cisco brought up multiple live feeds from ground-based cameras and telescopes showing the Dominator ships surrounding the planet from orbit in a repeating, regular pattern. A strange, bluish white field emanated from each ship, twisting and overlapping so as to cover the Earth in its entirety. Cold crept into Rip's stomach.

"That," Felicity replied, simply.

After a short silence, Thea spoke up. "Um, are we all supposed to know what we're looking at?"

"That," Rip interjected heavily, "is a chrono-spatial dampening field." All heads turned in his direction, but he addressed the Legends first. "It's the field the Waverider ran into when we first arrived, and the reason the journey was so rough."

"Um, what is a…whatever it is you just said?" Wally asked.

"A chrono-spatial dampening field," Rip began, "is an energy field that isolates a location in both space and time. When a proper field is in place, no one may enter or leave that location either physically or temporally."

"We made it through, though," Amaya pointed out.

"Yes," Rip agreed, "and I'd hoped that would be the end of that business, but it appears the Dominators were a bit dismayed by our success. They didn't exert a strong enough field with the ships they had initially to keep out something like the Waveirder, so they've reinforced it. That's why all the ships above Earth's cities retreated into orbit."

"But what purpose could this possibly serve?" Stein inquired.

"My guess is that the Dominators assumed by this point that all metahumans would be wiped out," Rip ventured. "Since their initial plan to detonate the metabomb failed, they've fallen onto a backup plan."

"So you're saying we can't get off Earth?" Sara asked apprehensively.

"Correct," Rip nodded. "Not through space, nor through time."

"Seems like a useless backup plan to me," Ray said. "The Waverider was destroyed. We're not traveling anywhere anyway."

"We might've been able to build a jumpship, though," Jax pointed out.

"True," Rip agreed, pointing at Jax in acknowledgement. "The larger point, however, is that this doesn't just affect us," he added ominously, trailing off into silence as he stared at two individuals in particular: Barry and Cisco.

Cisco pointed at himself in surprise. "Us?"

"Yes, Mr. Ramon. You and Mr. Allen, and I suppose Mr. West when he's ready," Rip explained, tilting his head towards Wally. "Your powers to create and travel through breaches in space and time will be negated as long as that field is operational."

"Meaning?" Oliver asked, somewhat impatiently.

"It means we don't get any twenty-four hour do-overs," Barry said heavily, "like we did the first time we fought Vandal Savage."

"We also can't get to other Earths for help," Caitlin pointed out. Looking around but focusing on Barry, Cisco, Iris, H.R., and Wally, she explained, "Jay. Harry. Jessie. There's no way to reach them now."

Rip sighed, looking again at the many live feeds of Dominator ships maintaining the ominous energy field around their planet. "Yes, and establishing a field that strong and that large is no small feat in planning or execution." He looked somberly around the room. "It appears the Dominators are prepared for the long haul."


	5. Chapter 5

October 2016 (Prelude)

 _"Can the Waverider handle the blast?" Sara asked, deeply concerned and skeptical._

 _"Honestly," Rip exhaled, "I have absolutely no idea…"_

As he hauled Mick's unconscious body through the corridors of the Waverider, the floor shaking underneath his feet and showers of bright sparks raining from the ceiling, Rip's thoughts were split in two. One half of his brain was jammed, overwhelmed with the same concern Sara had voiced before he had scattered her and the rest of the team throughout time to keep them safe. _Could the Waverider withstand the force of an atomic bomb? It wasn't designed for this!_

The other half of his brain was frantically running through all the variables that, if absolutely, perfectly, divinely aligned, might be enough to save the ship. The physical performance of the hull at their current depth underwater. The angle of impact between the ship and the bomb. The face of the ship that got the brunt of the explosion. The frequency of the structural integrity fields that held the entire ship together through both space and time.

If he had thirty hours, he might have had enough time to run through the almost innumerable simulations it would take to optimize the Waverider's chances for survival. As Gideon told him when he departed the bridge, however, he only had thirty seconds, which meant that everything in this moment came down to luck.

Reaching the medbay, Rip dropped Mick's unconscious body into the chair and hooked him up to the Waverider's core systems, placing him into temporal stasis. He hoped he would be able to expedite the healing process shortly, but having no idea in what condition the Waverider would be within a matter of seconds, he wanted to give Mick the best chance at survival. In temporal stasis, he wouldn't heal nearly as fast, but he would be drawing very little power from the, presumably, heavily damaged Waverider compared to a more direct treatment of his wounds, extending his life for as long as necessary.

As he worked feverishly, a detached part of Rip's brain marveled at how hard he was trying to save the life of a notorious criminal right after speeding the rest of his team off into distant corners of time. Despite the multitude of occasions on which the disparate personalities of the Waverider's crew drove Rip to his wit's end, he found himself caring more deeply for their welfare than he had ever expected. Over time, they had become more than his teammates, more than comrades. They were his friends. His family.

After a few tense seconds, Rip finally got the stasis field established around Mick, securing the safety of the last of his crew. Straightening up, he then prepared himself to face his fate. "Gideon," he called softly.

"I'm here, Captain."

A small chuckle. "Ah, you always are." With that, he braced himself, the back of his mind counting down.

 _Three…two…one…_

The Waverider rocked violently to one side as it felt the impact of the atomic bomb, throwing Rip against a wall. He bounced off and slid back across the floor, his head banging against the chair in which he had just deposited Mick. Seeing stars behind his eyelids as he shut his eyes against the pain, Rip gripped desperately to the chair he had been so rudely crushed against as he waited to ride out the aftershocks and undulations the Waverider would experience as Gideon attempted to get things under control.

They never came.

In fact, the ship seemed to right itself far more quickly and easily than Rip expected. Slowly, cautiously, Rip crawled out from under the chair and got unsteadily to his feet. "Gideon?" he asked, tentatively. "What's our status?"

"The Waverider is surprisingly not destroyed, Captain." Not even the AI could hide the frank astonishment in her voice.

"We _were_ hit with the bomb, yes?"

"Indeed, Captain, and we have sustained significant damage, but the result was far less catastrophic than we feared."

"Clearly," Rip replied, looking around in relieved bewilderment at his largely intact ship. He thought back to all the variables that would have had to come together, and at random no less, to even give the Waverider a chance. "The odds of this happening were…"

"…astronomical," Gideon replied.

In his experience as a Time Master, Rip had wondered whether a truly random event was possible. He knew time often had what could only be described as a sick sense of humor, and often very distant causes created, paradoxically, completely unrelated effects. He had learned to sometimes be suspicious of such fortuitous results.

Given the magnitude of what had just happened, however, he was more inclined to just be grateful for some good luck, for a change.

"Well," he said, clapping his hands, "I suppose we shall take our good fortune where we can find it. Gideon, how long will repairs take?"

"Between the two of us, approximately two days."

"Very well," Rip nodded. "We'll complete those as quick as we can, and then we shall go retrieve our team."

May 2026 (War)

Sara lay flat on her back, hard gravel driving into her side while dust coated her face and dulled her blond hair. Her left leg was wedged underneath a huge slab of concrete that had fallen loose from a crumbling building, and her right arm was lost amid a pile of rubble that used to be paved roads and clean-kept sidewalks.

It was a cloudless blue sky, with the sun shining merrily on a warm day, a day on the trailing edge of spring before the heat of summer arrived. Sara couldn't help the pang in her heart as she lowered her eyes to the ruined city around her. Star City (though in her head she still called it Starling City) had been her home throughout her entire childhood. She'd gone to school here, celebrated birthdays and holidays here, and formed her early relationships here, but "here" was now a collection of abandoned buildings, with the windows broken and the walls cracked. In the midst of war, it was simply too dangerous to live someplace so exposed.

She made a show of struggling to free herself as she lifted her left hand to her ear. "How far out are you?"

Oliver's voice came over her comm. "Five hundred meters."

 _Too far away to spot_ , Sara thought to herself, looking around. In spite of the ruin, the basic grid pattern of the city blocks was still discernible, which could have been comforting but instead was just depressing. What made it worse was that she would probably never see them coming.

Fortunately, she did hear them coming.

Alien hissing filled her ears as a Dominator scout party descended upon her from the shadows, attracted by the sound of her writhing in the rubble. They wasted no time surrounding her as their leader clambered over her, leaning over her prone body.

"What's this?" the Dominator taunted in her mind. "A human rat came out of its hole?"

"Go find someone else to taunt," Sara spat back.

The Dominator tilted its head, seemingly amused at her defiance, and then craned its neck so that it could bring its face offensively close to hers. She could count individual teeth in its unnaturally wide mouth.

"Rats are vermin," the Dominator intoned, "and vermin must be exterminated."

"You first," Sara growled, and her right arm exploded out of the rubble. Her hand, encased in a metallic, red-and-blue glove, slapped open-palmed into the Dominator's face, and the alien let out a shriek as a high-voltage electrical shock coursed through its body while Sara shoved it backwards into its squad, the wrinkled skin of its face already blackened.

The Dominator squad quickly closed in, but they were already too late in realizing the trap into which they had walked willingly. Sara swung her leg out from under the slab it was supposedly pinned and helicoptered her legs around to knock away the initial thrusts of Dominator claws before using the momentum to swing to her feet.

The closest Dominator surged forward, thrusting its claw forward to stab her, and she stepped into the strike and deflected with her left arm, slamming the open palm of her glove into the Dominator's chest and electrocuting it into oblivion, the charred smell of alien flesh beginning to fill the air.

Two more Dominators, one after the other, came at her next, with the closer one making a dive at her legs, but Sara was faster. She got one leg over this second Dominator and used its body as a springboard to launch herself into the air, flipping and twisting over the third Dominator that followed too closely and clumsily after its compatriot. As she came down, she slapped her glove into the third Dominator's back, and it screamed as its body went rigid, its arm locked into a ninety-degree angle with the claw sticking out perpendicular to its chest. When the second Dominator tried to recover and come after her, she kicked the third Dominator into it, impaling the second alien on the third's spear-like appendage.

She whirled around to face the last two aliens in the squad, but she wasn't quite as quick this time, and both of them held their claws to her neck. They only enjoyed their victory for that one second, however, because in the next second an arrow pierced through the backs of each of their skulls, the points just coming out between their eyes. Sticky yellow liquid, the blood of the Dominators, dripped off the points as the aliens crumpled to the ground on their faces, allowing Sara to observe the green fletching on one arrow and red fletching on the other.

Oliver and Thea emerged from behind some rubble. Sara held out her arms in the universal "What the hell?" gesture.

"Five hundred meters?" she asked sarcastically. "Was that really necessary?"

"You know how sharp the Dominator senses are," Oliver countered. "They may have sensed the ambush if we hid too close."

"I almost got my throat slit."

"We made it in time to help."

"Barely."

"Come on, Sara," Thea smirked. "I know you love using that glove whenever you can."

Sara looked down at the gauntlet encasing her right hand, a contraption Ray and Cisco had collaborated on to give Sara something more deadly to aliens than her batons. A spare ATOM suit glove, a compact power supply, some modifications, and she now had a new energy weapon to unleash on their alien nemesis.

She rolled her eyes at Thea's quip. "Not the point."

Oliver raised an impatient but placating open hand. "Fine, we won't cut it so close next time, but more scouts will probably be here soon, so we need to get back under cover."

Thea huffed, dissatisfied. "Guess we've done our one, insignificant good deed for the day."

"It's better than nothing," Sara replied, although she too couldn't derive much optimism from such small victories.

Oliver strode between the two of them, cutting off the conversation. "We need to move."

…

After picking their way carefully through debris and past ruined buildings, occasionally ducking into the shadows to avoid direct confrontations with more Dominators, Sara, Oliver, and Thea trekked to the outskirts of the city. Aside from the roving bands of aliens, the former metropolitan city was deserted, the once-familiar stomping grounds of the three native Starlingites now unrecognizable partially because of the damage, but mostly due to the emptiness.

Carefully flitting amongst seemingly nondescript rubble, the three found an equally inconspicuous slab of concrete and, checking that the coast was clear, lifted it up, revealing its attachment to a hinge and the uncovered manhole underneath. Quickly, the three of them dove down into the darkness below and pulled the opening closed over their heads. From there, they began the long, circuitous trek back to the Bunker.

Frequent Dominator assaults had wrecked the building over Oliver's base of operations as the Green Arrow, ruining the secret elevator entrance. It had taken the combined efforts of the ATOM's energy blasters, Firestorm's transmutation powers, and the Flash's vibrational skills to craft a new, more secret path linking the Bunker to the city's sewer systems. It was not the easiest or the most pleasant-smelling option, but so far they had escaped detection.

After a seemingly endless number of turns, foul smells, and slippery walkways, the three climbed up a ladder and popped the cover at the top, hauling themselves up through the floor of the bunker. Upon their arrival, Felicity approached them and got straight to the point.

"Barry wants to arrange a meetup," Felicity reported.

"What for?" Oliver asked.

"He says Stein may have worked out a plan of action, a way for us to finally go on the offensive. He doesn't want to risk the plan being intercepted, so he wants us to gather in person over the next few days."

"Everyone?"

Felicity nodded. "He wants to get as many resistance cells in on this as he can."

Thea whistled softly. "It's not going to be easy converging on one spot without the Dominators noticing. They may not be watching every road, but they could still be anywhere."

"We'll just have to travel carefully," Oliver replied. "And mostly by night."

"In that case, we better get started," Sara declared. "It's going to take a while to get to Central City. Let's round up the troops."

…

Ten years of war had driven all humans out of Earth's densely populated areas, with the vast majority of the population perishing in the fighting and the remnants scrambling to hide. Those who were so unlucky they neither escaped nor died, meanwhile, were forced into Dominator labor camps, though the "labor" was not the end goal, for as far as any human spies could tell, the Dominators had moved on from the short term solution of killing all powered individuals and were now running experiments to try to stamp out the metahuman gene from the outset.

Of the humans who survived, some found refuge in isolated, rural groups, too small for the Dominators to expend much attention. Many more found refuge in fortified military bases that thus far had been able to hold out, largely due to advantageous terrain like mountains and state-of-the-art equipment from ARGUS and other formerly covert operations. Others regrouped underground to form resistance cells led by former police or otherwise highly motivated citizens.

Unfortunately, these cells were scattered across the country and open travel was difficult, so Barry had had no idea how many of his contacts would make it to Central City. Both S.T.A.R. Labs and the hanger they had used as a base years ago had been destroyed, but Eobard Thawne had been quite successful in the fifteen years he had masqueraded as Harrison Wells, accumulating numerous properties both public and hidden. Their current underground location was in fact mere miles from the hanger, making it a surprisingly effective, if clichéd, "it's the last place they'll think to look" hideout.

He had offered himself and Wally to help the resistance cells with transportation, but even they had limits to what they could do, and so he was largely forced to wait out the multiple days it would take for everyone to convene, if they came at all.

Which is why he felt his heart unclench, ever so slightly, when the extent of his reinforcements poured in. Even Rip, the Time Master Who Disapproves of Speedsters, answered his call, creating a bit of a reunion for the Legends.

"Rip!" Sara called brightly. She had arrived a day earlier with the Star City resistance cell and now walked over to give Rip a hug as he arrived. Professor Stein and Jax went to greet Ray, Mick, and Amaya, who had followed behind.

"Hello, Sara," Rip replied warmly. "How's the hunting in Star City?"

"Ah you know, some days are better than others," she replied. "Ollie, Thea and I are doing the best we can, but it's a lot of hit-and-runs. You?"

"Much the same story, I'm afraid," Rip said. "Blüdhaven's local population is certainly more proactive than most, but even with their help we haven't managed much more than glorified vandalism and occasional ambushes." He paused for a moment, then continued, "We miss you, you know. You and Stein and Jax. The team feels…incomplete without everyone together."

Sara sighed. "I wish I could be everywhere at once, but you know Star City is my home. Stein and Jax feel the same about Central City. We need to be close to our families."

Barry, who was standing nearby, noted the businesslike way Rip accepted Sara's reasoning, but he could also tell Rip was disappointed not having her and the others fighting at his side. Over the years, Firestorm had become a regular team member of Barry's as they strove to free Central City, and he knew from conversations with both Stein and Jax that Rip's communications with them would invariably include a pitch to join his resistance efforts in Blüdhaven. However, like Sara, their loyalties were strongest with their families, and those families resided in the cities that birthed them.

He certainly could understand that sentiment. Joe and Iris were significant members of the resistance in both Central City and Keystone City across the river, and he and Wally kept regular tabs on them to make sure they were safe. He thought it was a little insensitive of Rip to keep pestering his teammates when it was clear where they felt they were needed most, but he supposed the Time Master had become accustomed to operating a certain way and didn't like the change, even after all these years.

"Is that everyone?" Oliver asked, snapping Barry out of his thoughts.

"I don't feel safe waiting much longer, so it'll have to be," Barry replied.

"Not a bad turnout, considering the circumstances," Oliver continued, which was true. Resistance fighters had come from Hub City and Blüdhaven, St. Roch and Coast City, Pittsburgh and Detroit, and from a handful of other places.

"But still smaller than it should be," Barry remarked somberly. The Dominators had hijacked some of humanity's radio signals and frequently posted live footage of their victories and conquests, and try as the heroes did to stay strong, the images were often demoralizing. A mace embedded in the side of a concrete wall. A katana stuck vertically into the earth. A cigarette lighter lying abandoned in rubble. Their alien oppressors never missed an opportunity to remind them of friends lost.

Oliver nodded gravely in agreement. "Then let's try not to lose any more."

…

"Now, this is our Earth," Stein was explaining, drawing a large, rudimentary sphere on a transparent board with a dark yellow marker. Perhaps showing his advanced age, Stein still seemed to have a fondness for standard whiteboard-style lectures, as if he had never left the teaching profession in all his years as one-half of Firestorm.

Rip and the rest of the room were gathered in a loose semicircle. Scattered vigilantes and metahumans, former military, ARGUS agents, police officers, and anyone else with the means and will to rise up and fight were listening intently. The Central City resistance cell and the reinforcements Barry had summoned were gathered in a small auditorium in an underground bunker not far from where the S.T.A.R. Labs hanger once stood, before a Dominator aerial assault burned it to the ground. No one was really clear why the bunker existed in the first place, although Rip knew Eobard Thawne by reputation as one of the more eccentric villains of history. He figured some dark corner of the speedster's mind had plans for this place, but now it was just one pocket of humanity's survival.

"And this," Stein continued, superimposing a grid over the large sphere he had drawn, "is the energy barrier impeding both temporal and inter-dimensional travel. If we take a closer look," he said, drawing a large oval to the side of the sphere to symbolize a zoomed-in view, "the field looks like this," he finished, sketching within the oval a cube with perfectly straight grid lines running in all three dimensions inside it.

"A completed uninterrupted dampening field," Ray summarized.

"Correct, Mr. Palmer," Stein confirmed. "Even as we stand here in this room, the field invisibly permeates us and every bit of space on Earth like a regular grid of radio waves."

Rip had an inkling of where Stein was heading with his discovery. Communications between various resistance cells had been sparse during the war, but he did receive occasional requests from Stein to consult with himself and Ray on various subjects of temporal mechanics, and he knew Stein had enlisted Felicity, Cisco, and Jax to help him with monitoring equipment and software to observe the Dominator's chrono-spatial field.

"Now, the Dominators believe their field is impenetrable, but my calculations show that, in very special cases, weak spots can actually be found."

"What kind of special cases?" Barry asks.

"Well, simply speaking Mr. Allen…you," Stein replied.

Barry cocked an eyebrow. "Me? How?"

"I've spent years studying telemetry from your suit, with Cisco's help," Stein said, motioning with his hand towards the engineer, "and I've also studied the evolution of your biochemistry with Caitlin's help," he added, motioning now to the geneticist. "When you run through a breach, your body produces very specific resonance fields to enable your travel."

"Resonance fields?" Oliver asked, confused.

"An energy field that allows Mr. Allen to move through the fabric of space and time," Rip chimed in. "All speedsters have the capability to master it for their purposes."

"Yes," Stein said, "with 'master' being the operative word. You, Barry, eventually were able to control your ability to travel through both space and time, but before you perfected the technique, you traveled through breaches by accident on multiple occasions."

"Right," Barry nodded. "When I traveled back in time against Mardon and Savage, and when I ran onto a new Earth while testing the tachyon device."

"Correct," Stein replied. "Now, in the last case, the tachyon device stabilized your resonance field for you to create the breach, but for the former two cases, your inability to precisely control the field created what I will call Tears in the temporal fabric of reality, like so," he said, going back to his drawing. He wiped away sections of the straight lines in the cube he had drawn on the board and drew a shapeless gap to illustrate his point. "I believe these are the weak points in the Dominator's dampening field."

"'Weak' how, exactly?"

At this point, Rip could tell Ray was catching on to the professor's findings. "The Dominator's dampening field has to be calibrated specifically to compensate for those Tears," he said excitedly. "If they don't know the Tears are there, then the dampening field wouldn't be properly set up to seal them off."

"Meaning breaches could be opened at those tears. Barry could run through them," Cisco breathed, also starting to catch on.

"Precisely," Stein agreed. "Now, since the Tears are specific to the type of accidental travel Barry activated previously, he will only be able to run through time, not space, but this is still an opportunity to change history, to find a way to end this war," he finished.

Barry ran his hands through his hair, shock evident in his face. He was clearly afraid to even dare hope that they had finally found an advantage over the Dominators, but at the same time any desperate straw they could grasp was too alluring to refuse. "This…this changes everything."

"How are we gonna use this?" Jax asked excitedly. "Have Barry run back in time? Maybe stop Flashpoint from ever happening? So the Dominators have no reason to attack us?"

Barry shook his head. "I don't think it'll be that simple. The Dominators knew I created Flashpoint. They knew I changed the timeline. Anything we do now will still be a change in the timeline, so the Dominators are coming no matter what." Jax seemed to deflate slightly at that, so Barry added, "But this is still an opportunity." Looking around the room, he finished, "This war's been ten years too long. We can change that."

"Can you?" Rip asked, quietly and yet loud enough to still be heard around the bunker.

Heads swiveled in Rip's direction, and Rip could see Barry mentally preparing himself for a fight. Their relationship had never been on the best terms, and a decade of war hadn't changed that.

"What do you think the problem is, Rip?" Sara asked, a little wearily. The distinct lack of cooperation between the two of them had become somewhat legendary.

"The Dominator's technology is clearly advanced enough to create a dampening field on a global scale. No one here thinks they wouldn't have accounted for these Tears?" he asked, waving his hand at Stein's rudimentary marker drawing. "No one here thinks this is a trap?"

"That would be an extremely long con if it is a trap," Cisco pointed out. "Barry hasn't tried to travel via breach since the field went up ten years ago."

"The aliens clearly thought far enough ahead to handicap specific metahumans," Rip retorted. "Is it so hard to envision they would have anticipated this too?"

"Well," Stein pointed out, "it is worth pointing out that the locations of these Tears are rather precise. In fact, they are exactly where Barry first ran through them accidentally."

Stein glanced at Barry, who responded, "So by the river, the first time against Mardon, and through downtown Central City, the second time against Savage."

"That's pretty specific information," Caitlin remarked, "not to mention information only Barry would know, since those timelines got erased."

"The Dominators were aware of Flashpoint. They could certainly be aware of these," Rip persisted.

"They're aware of the general existence of Flashpoint," Cisco countered, "not the exact details of Barry's experiences. They have no reason to look for Tears."

Rip huffed exasperatedly, once again stymied by the almost absurd level of trust laid in Barry's abilities and experiences against his own expertise as a Time Master. It was Ray who finally voiced some support, even if it was thin. "Look, I think the larger point of Rip's argument is that the Dominators _have_ been getting the better of us for years now. If we consider this our best move, we should make sure we prepare.

"Understanding of course, that if we succeed in altering history to defeat the Dominators, our timeline will cease to exist," Stein added seriously, "and by extension, _we_ would cease to exist."

"I don't know about everyone else, but compared to what we've lost, I can't say this reality is worth saving," Thea stated baldly.

"And I'm tired of reacting to this scumbags," Mick growled, finally giving his opinion. "I wanna take the fight to them."

"This does seem to be our most coherent plan of attack in years, our best opportunity," Oliver said. "I think we should take it," he finished, looking at Barry.

Barry nodded back. "I agree."

Rip felt the room shift irreversibly in favor of going forward with the plan once the Scarlet Speedster and Emerald Archer had made their choices. Seemingly for the hundredth time, he acquiesced outwardly with a nod of his head while silently fuming inwardly. "Very well. I pray we aren't wrong."

…

"All the resistance leaders are prepping their cells," Diggle reported, walking into a conference room that they had cleared after the meeting and shutting the door behind him. "In a few days, they'll be ready to go when we are."

"Good," Oliver replied. "Now we just need to decide what to do."

It had been a long time since this group of individuals had been together in one place. While he, Rip, operated in Blüdhaven with Ray, Amaya, and Mick, Oliver operated out of Star City with Thea, Felicity, and Sara. Barry, with Cisco, Caitlin, Wally, Jax, and Stein, operated out of Central City. Diggle was often away on his own missions, rallying support and marshaling all the military he could find. Face-to-face meetings had become exceedingly rare.

"I think I know," Barry began. "Look, this war has proven that the world's militaries aren't strong enough to beat the Dominators. What we needed at the start of all this was for everyone," he continued, gesturing around the room with his hand, "to be together. To fight on a united front."

"Yeah, at the start, it was really just the four of them," Felicity said, pointed at Oliver, Barry, Diggle, and Thea.

"What are we, chopped liver?" Cisco asked, waving at himself and Caitlin. Felicity shrugged.

"The point," Barry cut in, "is that we would have stood a better chance if we had had a way to have the Legends with us from the start."

"Yeah, we had no idea you were in trouble until we detected that time quake," Jax said. "Once that happened, it was already too late. The Dominators had their chrono-spatial field up, and the best we could do was show up at the end of the battle."

"But if you're there at the beginning, we'd stand more of a chance to beat them back before they gain a foothold," Thea realized. "Have a greater show of force to make the Dominators second-guess invading us."

"Bingo," Barry replied. "The problem ten years ago was that we didn't have a way to contact the Waverider."

"We can fix that," Ray said. "Design a communicator to allow you to get in touch with us no matter where, or when, we are."

"And if I run back in time and leave that communicator with someone, Felicity maybe, then there would be a way to get you all back here before the dampening field gets thrown up."

"Will that be enough, though?" Amaya asked, a frown wrinkling her forehead. "Fine, we were a few days too late, but after ten years, we haven't been able to turn the tide, even with," she paused briefly, indicating everyone in the room, "all of us together. We're outmatched, plain and simple."

Barry nodded. "I agree with you. I think we need the Legends, but that still won't be enough."

"So what else can we do?" Wally asked.

In response, Barry turned to Stein. "How many times can we use the Tears to go back in time?"

It was Rip, however, who answered. "In theory, an infinite number of times, but I am certain using them will create a ripple effect through the dampening field that will alert the Dominators to our intentions. They will undoubtedly try to stop us, and if they do, they could also close the Tears, since we'd be revealing their precise locations."

Stein nodded in agreement. "Given that detail, I am afraid each Tear will probably only be usable to us once."

"We only have two Tears," Ray pointed out. "That means we can only make two changes to history."

"So if bringing in the Legends is one change, what's the second?" Thea asked.

Barry turned to the group and took a deep breath. "Okay, I know we've all seen a lot in our lifetimes, but there's stuff out there that gets even crazier. Ten years ago, I ran onto an Earth in a parallel universe and met someone known to her world as Supergirl."

"Supergirl? Another metahuman?" Sara asked.

Barry shook his head. "An alien. A friendly one, if you can believe it."

"Okay," Mick said slowly, already sounding bored. "What's so 'super' about her?"

"Well, she's bulletproof," Barry began. "She can fly. She's pretty fast. She can blast things with her eyes, and she's more powerful than a locomotive."

A few moments of silence passed. "I'm…not sure I believe that," Jax stated cautiously.

"Says the guy who merges with another guy to shoot fireballs from his hands," Ray pointed out. Jax shrugged.

"The point is, I helped her out when I ended up on her world, and she might be willing to return the favor. An alien with that kind of power could really have helped us shift the balance."

"Why didn't you recruit her to help us before?" Sara asked.

"Barry had to take a very specific path to reach her Earth," Cisco chimed in. "The tachyon device that tracked that path got destroyed, and we couldn't find her."

"And that," Barry concluded, pointing at Cisco, "is what I think our second change should be. Keep that device in one piece so that we can find Supergirl and bring her back to our Earth."

"Sounds like a plan," Ray said enthusiastically, clapping his hands.

"But, Barry," Wally ventured, stepping up, "if what Rip and Professor Stein said is true, the Dominators will know as soon as we use one Tear to run back in time. How can you pull off two changes by yourself?"

"I won't," Barry said, walking up to Wally and putting a hand on his shoulder. "You're going to help me. Two Tears. Two speedsters."

"Me?" Wally asked, eyes widening. "I've never traveled through time before."

"Don't worry," Barry reassured him. "I'll coach you through it. Between me, Cisco, and Professor Stein, we'll get you ready." Wally looked unsure.

"That is a lot of pressure you're putting on his shoulders, Mr. Allen," Rip cut in. " _Many_ things can go wrong with time travel, especially when you're doing it for the first time. You of all people should know that," he finished snidely.

Barry turned away from Wally to face Rip. "Look, this is our best shot, and over the past ten years, Wally's shown he's more than capable of handling a speedster's powers. He mastered his abilities way faster than I did."

"He's never time traveled before," countered Rip.

"Because he's never had the opportunity," Barry shot back. "Not when we thought the dampening field sealed off the whole planet. Now he had a chance to do it himself!"

"You have no idea if he's ready!" Rip returned. "You shouldn't force him into this."

"I'll do it."

Rip and Barry turned their heads to Wally. A decade of fighting had hardened nearly all of them, but like Barry, Wally enjoyed enhanced regenerative powers that certainly appeared to slow his aging. Despite experiencing the same hardships as everyone else, his youth still shone through his face. Rip didn't think Wally really understood what he was agreeing to, which frustrated him even more.

"Mr. West, you don't have to—"

"No. I'll do it," Wally repeated, nodding his head. He turned to Barry. "Two speedsters," he said, holding up his hand.

Barry smiled. "Two speedsters," he agreed, clapping Wally's hand and pulling him into the standard one-arm bro hug. Rip rolled his eyes and stepped back, lapsing into silence.

"Okay," Oliver said. "It sounds like we have a plan of attack. We'll spend the next few days determining logistics and agreeing on a timeline to carry out the mission," he said, looking specifically at Diggle, who nodded in return.

"In the meantime, we have some training to do," Barry said to Wally. Turning to Cisco, he pointed out, "Also, to be safe, we should equip me and Wally with sonic gauntlets, like what Hartley used. In case any time wraiths show up."

"Good call," Cisco agreed, pointing at Barry. "Between Ray, Jax, and me, we should be able to whip those up pretty quick."

"Time wraiths?" Wally asked, beginning to sound worried again. "What are those?"

"Don't worry," Barry reassured him. "They patrol the Speed Force sometimes and attack speedsters, but we've beaten them before."

"What do they look like?"

"They're sort of hard to describe. Did you read the Harry Potter books?"

"Actually, I just saw the movies."

Simultaneously, Thea's, Cisco's, and Felicity's heads whipped around in shock to face Wally, whose eyes widened in alarm. " _Excuse me?_ " Felicity demanded.

"Wait, hold up," Cisco joined in, outraged.

"Guys," Barry said, raising a placating palm. "Not important."

"Debatable," Thea replied.

"Thea, not now," Oliver sighed.

"Anyway," Barry said, as Wally continued to look cautiously at the three pairs of stink eyes he was receiving, "they look sort of like dementors, but with the sonic gauntlets, we'll be safe."

Wally, who seemed a little more concerned with his current safety, nodded his head. "If you say so."

"I know so," Barry replied. "You'll do great."

With that, the crowd in the room began to disperse, attending to preparations for their first real shot at hope in a long time. As the room emptied, Rip caught Wally's eyes, and his message was clear.

 _I hope you know what you're in for._

…

 _Author's notes: The Prelude section refers directly to, and takes a few dialogue lines from, DC's Legends of Tomorrow 2x01, "Out of Time."_

 _If anyone reading is a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, Sara's fighting style with the glove is based on Asami._


	6. Chapter 6

May, 2026 (War)

"We only had time to make one glove for each of you," Ray explained, fitting a black gauntlet over Wally's left hand in a similar fashion to how he had just fitted Barry's left hand. "But it's been preset with the frequency Cisco said worked against the time wraiths before. Just aim with your left hand and use your right hand to activate it with this button on the bottom," he pointed out, indicating a button with his finger.

"Got it," Barry said, flexing his gloved left hand. "Great work, Ray."

Ray nodded. "Also, you'll see on top, above your wrist, you have a simple digital display with your timer. It'll activate as soon as you enter the breach. Stein explained to you both what it's for, right?"

"An alarm clock?" Mick chimed in unhelpfully, as he stood to one side, eating.

Wally rolled his eyes. "The dampening field's disrupting temporal stability around Earth, so our changes to the timeline won't take effect as long as we're still in the past," he told Mick. "We need to come back at the same time in order for history to change the way we want it to."

"And as long as we're gone, the timelines in the past and the present will be running concurrently," Barry finished. "So the easiest way to sync our returns is to have our gloves alert us with an agreed-upon time that we set beforehand."

"So it's an alarm clock," Mick retorted.

"Well…yeah."

…

"Now, Barry and Wally will both need some help punching through the dampening field at the Tears to run back in time," Stein explained to Rip as Jax fiddled with Gideon's backup mainframe, the Console, strapped to his wrist. "Cisco's natural ability to create breaches will suffice for one of the Tears. As for the other, Gideon's power source allows your Console to do the same, with some modifications."

"I see," Rip replied, watching as Jax inserted a small disc into a slot in the mainframe. Gideon's face appeared on the screen.

"Captain, I need your authorization for this modification."

"Very well. Authorization: Hunter 0102714."

"Confirmed. Downloading."

"That was simple," Rip commented.

"Yeah well, that'll probably be the easiest part of this whole mission," Jax said.

"Indeed," Stein agreed. "In order for us to successfully change history, you and Cisco must coordinate with the speedsters to open the breaches at exactly the right times, both for when they leave and when they come back. There will be no communicating with them while they are in the past, so timing will be crucial."

"Is it too much to ask that we just leave them in the past?" Rip sighed.

"Captain," Stein scolded, "you know how dangerous it is for speedsters to exist too long in time periods with past versions of themselves. No, it is imperative they return at the same time. If they don't, or if they don't return at all, history—"

"—history will fail to reset," Rip interrupted in a droning voice, "and our efforts will be for naught. I _do_ know some things about time travel, Professor."

…

"…and so with the Tears located in these two spots, we'll need our diversion to take Dominator support troops as far away from them as we can."

Oliver circled three spots on a paper map of Central City spread out on a table in front of him. Around his planning council, there was a swirl of activity as resistance fighters organized themselves into squads, tracked down missing equipment, loaded and reloaded guns, and generally amped themselves up for the fight ahead. These men and women, of all different ages and backgrounds, had spent years running for their lives, fighting to survive, and worrying about seeing tomorrow, but now they had a chance, finally, to strike back.

Sara looked down at the map. A spot by the river and a spot in what had been downtown, the two Tears, were circled in red marker. The third location seemed less clear to her. "What's there?" she asked, pointing.

"A staging area," Diggle explained. "With most of the Dominators ships needed in orbit to maintain the dampening field, they've concentrated their fortifications in specific locations to compensate for the lack of air support. This spot," he continued, tapping on the third circled area on the outskirts of the city, "seems to be their base of operations in Central City."

"And it's where we want to keep their attention," Oliver finished.

Sara nodded. "So the Legends will split up and cover Barry and Wally at the Tears…," she began.

"…while Dig, Thea, and I lead the bulk of the resistance fighters against the Dominator base," Oliver finished.

"Forgetting your metahuman backup, Robin Hood?" a cold, echoing voice asked.

Oliver jumped, forgetting that Caitlin was standing at the other end of the table. She had been listening and observing so silently that he had momentarily forgotten she was there. "No," he said, recovering quickly. "I just thought you'd want to team with Cisco or Barry at the Tears."

"Well, it seems like they've got plenty of backup in the Legends, whereas your team seems a little light on powers," she sneered, her eyes momentarily flashing an icy blue.

"Caitlin," Cisco said gently, placing a placating hand on her arm. "Easy."

Caitlin closed her eyes and turned her head away for a moment, and when she opened her eyes again, they were back to a soft brown. "I'm sorry, Cisco," she sighed to him, her voice back to normal. "With everything going on, she's getting agitated." She looked around like she was desperate to get away as she nervously rubbed the sleeves of her functional black combat uniform. "I'll…I'll go update the other teams." With that, she pulled away from Cisco's hand and strode away, to her credit with her head still held up high.

As Cisco gazed sadly at her retreating form, Oliver asked bluntly, "Can we trust her?"

Cisco sighed. "Try to understand. She didn't want powers. She didn't want to fight."

"Can she keep herself under control?" Sara asked.

Another sigh. "Everyone who's fought here in Central City has had her watch our backs at one point or another, and we're still alive." He hesitated slightly before continuing, "That doesn't mean we're completely comfortable around her."

"How does that even work?" Diggle chimed in. "Who's in charge, Caitlin or Killer Frost?"

"They sort of have an uneasy truce," Cisco explained. "Neither one is thrilled with the arrangement, but neither one likes aliens either. And they both want to stay alive."

"But can we _trust_ her?" Oliver asked insistently.

"She won't betray us to the Dominators, if that's what you're afraid of," Cisco hedged. "Just don't expect Killer Frost to let Caitlin stick her neck out for anyone, even if she wants to."

Present, 2056 (Occupation)

"This is it."

Trudging through the decades-old, hopefully abandoned sewer passage that led to the Bunker, Felicity couldn't shut her mind to the memories she had of fighting for Star City with Oliver, Thea, and Sara. Friends…no, family was more accurate.

It was a relief to get to the end, a decaying ladder that led up to a nondescript patch of ceiling. Felicity pointed out the loose panel that would open into the floor of the Bunker.

"You think he's sealed it?" Barry asked.

Felicity shook her head. "He doesn't have the means to make a new entrance. This is the only way in or out."

Barry nodded, satisfied, and climbed up the ladder to the ceiling, gingerly lifting one hand above his head to slowly work the panel free. After a few seconds, it jarred loose, and Barry raised it a couple inches.

Suddenly, the panel flew out of his grip, like it had been kicked away, and before Felicity knew what was happened, she and Barry were staring into a bright light and a long, black cylinder. She knew Barry was fast enough to speed her out of danger if necessary, but squinting down the barrel of a gun still didn't do wonders for her nerves.

An unamused huff sounded as the light was angled away from their faces, though the gun barrel didn't move. Her eyes needed a few seconds to adjust before she could make out the heavily scarred, pitted, bearded face that was currently regarding her.

"I have nothing to say to you," Rip growled at them.

"Well, that's perfect," Felicity replied, "because we have a lot to say to you, and we don't need you interrupting."

May, 2026 (War)

"Well, you sort of got what you've wanted," Jax quipped to Rip, his pupil-less eyes surveying the ruined buildings, torn up streets, and piled up debris that once was downtown Central City. "The Legends are back together."

"Not quite," Rip corrected. "But yes, being on the same mission does bring back fond memories."

"At least we're not the ones screwing up history this time," Ray said over the communications.

"What? You're saying _we're_ gonna screw it up, now?" Wally asked, mildly indignant over the comms.

"Mr. Allen doesn't really have a good record in that department, if you'll recall," Rip said drolly.

"Not helping," Barry replied.

As planned, humanity's forces had deployed in three teams in the attempt to change history and end the Dominator threat before it started. Wally, escorted by Sara, Ray, and Amaya, was stationed by the river Tear. Cisco would help him open a breach, and multiple teams of resistance fighters, led by former ARGUS agents, were stationed in every direction to combat inevitable Dominator counterattacks. Barry, escorted by Jax (merged with Stein) and Mick, was stationed by the downtown Tear, with Rip prepared to open a breach as well and other ARGUS teams also at the ready, gun barrels glinting in the weak sunlight from within ruined buildings and behind piles of rubble.

Both squads were waiting for a signal from Felicity, who was waiting for Oliver's team to engage the Dominators at the alien staging area further down the river. He, Thea, Diggle, and Caitlin were leading a massive squad of resistance fighters against the alien base with the hope of driving them out. Their ultimate goal was, of course, to divert attention away from the Tears, but the idea of a suicide run was not appealing to anyone, and if they could achieve more than acting as glorified cannon fodder, so much the better.

Until that signal came in, however, they were left anxiously waiting, careful not to punch through the Tears until absolutely necessary, as that would immediately alert the Dominators to their intentions. "You ready, Wally?" Barry asked.

"As ready as I can be on a few days of time-travel training," Wally replied over the comms.

"Any questions on where and when you're going?"

"Nope," Wally said, noticeably injecting confidence into his voice. "2016, right after Zoom kidnaps me."

"And while we're all at Barry and Joe's house trying to figure out how to rescue you…," Cisco began.

"…I'll go to S.T.A.R. Labs and switch out the tachyon device under Barry's chest piece with the dummy you guys put together," Wally finished. "I'll then leave it on Cisco's workbench for him to find."

"Remember what Grey said," Jax warned. "You have to return to our time exactly when your timer says so, or Cisco won't have the breach open for you at the right moment."

"Got it."

"Are _you_ ready, Barry?" Ray asked.

"Yeah, I got this," Barry said, also taking care to profess confidence, though whether it matched what he was really feeling was anyone's guess. Rip noticed him palming the device he, Ray, and Felicity had put together for Barry to bring back through time. "I'll find you and Felicity. Don't worry about me."

"Almost makes you wish our biggest problem was Savitar, doesn't it?" Cisco quipped.

Barry chuckled. "Careful what you wish for. If this works and we stop the dampening field from blocking him, he's probably going to pop out of whatever dimension he's stuck in."

"I guess it'll be a problem for our 2016 selves."

At that moment, Felicity's voice blared into all of their ears. "Overwatch to strike teams, the diversion has begun. You're a go!"

"Copy that," Barry replied. Looking towards Rip, he motioned with his hand. "You're up."

Taking his cue, Rip stepped forward, facing the exact point Barry had accidentally run through time while fleeing a destructive energy wave let loose by Vandal Savage in a previous timeline. "Ready, Cisco?" he asked into his comm.

"And waiting," Cisco replied.

"On my mark, then," Rip said, pointing the Console strapped to his wrist and preparing to activate it with the push of a button. "Three, two, one, now!" Pressing down, his arm felt a little jolt as a stream of blue-and-white energy spread out from his wrist, widening into a cone that ended at the coordinates of the Tear. The energy fluctuated and struggled for a few moments, fighting the interference from the Dominator's dampening field as it tried to collapse the breach.

However, Professor Stein's calculations proved to be correct, and after a few tense seconds, the energy evened out and a swirling vortex appeared in midair. "Breach open," Rip reported.

"Breach open," Cisco agreed over the comms. At Rip's side, Barry stepped up, his glove held up in front of his chest. "You good, Wally?" Barry asked a final time.

"I'm good," Wally replied. "Let's do this." Out of the corner of his eye, Rip saw Barry tense up, getting ready to run.

"Good luck," he muttered to the Scarlet Speedster. His differences with the Flash aside, he sorely hoped for the success of this mission.

Barry nodded his thanks, took a breath, and jumped into superspeed, running straight into the breach. Rip's arm felt another jolt, the result of the complicated interactions between the dampening field, his breach, and Barry's speed. After a few seconds, Rip cut the power to the Console, and the breach collapsed and disappeared. Unexpectedly, Rip fell to his knees, feeling a sudden loss of breath and energy. _That was more draining than I thought_.

Over his earpiece, he heard commotion on the other end that suggested Cisco had felt the same. "Breach…closed," Cisco huffed.

"Breach closed," Rip confirmed. "It's up to them now."

January, 2016 (Prelude)

"But who knows?" Felicity shrugged, looking up at Ray from her wheelchair. "Maybe the future Mrs. Palmer is out there somewhere in the past…or the future…or in some parallel universe…"

"Ah," Ray sighed, "I'm off to save the world, not fall in love."

Felicity chuckled. "You can't do both?"

Ray laughed quietly along with her. "I guess we'll see how it goes." They lapsed into a comfortable silence for a few moments, and then Ray said, "Well, I should get going. Don't want to miss my ride. Need a push?"

"Nah," Felicity said, waving her hand dismissively. "I'll find my own way out. Stay safe, Ray."

"You too. Bye Felicity," Ray replied. He then strode out of her Palmer Tech office, which had originally been _his_ Palmer Tech office, and before that, the executive office of Queen Consolidated. Barry heard the elevator doors open and close a few seconds later.

Hiding in the shadows as he was in the conference room next to the office, it hurt his heart to see his friends in happier times. It was ironic to really call these "happier," since Ray was off to fight Vandal Savage and Felicity was still in a wheelchair because of Damien Darhk. Still, compared to where and when he had come from, this time period was positively blissful.

As it turned out, his run through time had been a success, and he had immediately made his way to the Palmer Tech building, where Felicity and Ray in 2026 told him they would be saying their goodbyes before Ray took off in the Waverider for the first time. All it took was running up the side of the building and coming down from the roof to the executive office, hiding in an adjacent room while past versions of his friends had their conversation.

Peeking out from the shadows now, he saw Felicity still sitting in her wheelchair where Ray had left her, reading a letter he had placed in her lap with a small, sad smile on her face. Her eyes downward, Barry knew she wouldn't notice what he was about to do.

Calling on a careful use of his superspeed, he ran to the desk in front of her, placed the communicator Rip, Felicity, and Ray had put together in 2026 on top of a stack of papers, pressed a button, and then ran back to his hiding spot without making a single noise. In the decade of war he had been embroiled in, he had frequently had to call upon his powers for stealth rather than flat-out speed, sacrificing time in order to move without disturbing a single piece of paper or a single speck of dust. In a happier period of his life, when he first got his powers, he ran circles around Iris in his lab at the CCPD, blurting out all his feelings to her without her being any the wiser. Now, this stealthy superspeed was a matter of survival, plain and simple.

He had just got settled back into the shadows when the device he left activated from his button push began to beep. Felicity's head whipped up, unaware that there was a new piece of hardware in her office. "What the…?"

She wheeled over to the desk as the puck-shaped device beeped a second time. By the time she got behind the desk and identified the source of the noise, the device had beeped a third time, and a holographic message began to play, Princess Leia-style.

"Good evening, Ms. Smoak," the holographic projection of Rip began.

Felicity's head turned from side to side, as if trying to find someone else the projection was talking to, before tapping her chest with her own finger. "Who? Me?"

The projection ignored her and continued. "My name is Rip Hunter. You and I have not officially met…not yet anyway," it amended. "But it is vitally important you receive this message, and this device, from me now."

"Strange man with a British accent leaving me a strange hockey puck-looking thingy," Felicity muttered. "Sure, that doesn't scream 'Bond villain' at all."

"This device was left here specifically for you from a time-traveling friend of yours," Rip's hologram continued. Felicity's head craned up to stare at the elevator in which Ray had left, and Barry smiled at Rip's little misdirection. "A day may come," the hologram sighed, "when you will need to contact the compatriots of yours who have departed on the Waverider. If and when that day arrives, you can use this communicator to connect with the ship, no matter where or when it is."

"Cool," Felicity muttered, her suspicion waning as she craned her neck to get a closer look.

"I encourage you to use your impressive intellect and resources to examine this device in full. It's operation should become clear to you then, and you will be prepared in your time of need," the hologram finished, bowing its head slightly as it completed its message. "Until then, I bid you farewell." The hologram of Rip cut out.

Gingerly, Felicity reached out and picked up the communicator, her concern that it was something dangerous clearly losing out to her inherent curiosity. When it did not, in fact, blow up in her face, she began turning it over and over in her hands. "High tech toy from the future?" she muttered to herself. "Aw Ray, you shouldn't have." Placing the device in her lap, she began wheeling excitedly out of the office. Once again, Barry heard the doors of the elevator open and close, and then there was silence.

Releasing a breath he hadn't realized he was holding, Barry stepped out of the shadows and surveyed the empty office in small satisfaction. _One step closer to taking down these damn aliens_ , he thought to himself. Glancing down at his gloved left hand, he took one look at his timer and started. He had to move fast to make the jump back to his time.

"2026, here I come," he sighed, before speeding out of the office.

…

 _Author's notes: Wally's excursion into the past refers to The Flash 2x18, "Versus Zoom."_

 _Barry's excursion into the past refers to DC's Legends of Tomorrow 1x14, "River of Time." Some dialogue lines are taken from that episode as well._

 _The idea of concurrent timelines was inspired by the movie X-Men: Days of Future Past._


	7. Chapter 7

May, 2026 (War)

 _This is too easy_.

Rip checked the timer on his Console and saw it was almost time to reopen the breaches again so that Wally and Barry could return. In the time that they had been waiting, Felicity had provided the teams with periodic updates on Oliver's progress attacking the Dominator staging area. He was apparently doing so good a job distracting the aliens that neither of the teams at the temporal Tears had experienced any attacks.

"Ready to bring them home?" Cisco asked over the comms.

"Let's hurry up and finish this," Rip muttered back. He turned to the downtown Tear and pointed his Console, preparing to activate it once more.

"Three," Cisco counted down, "two, one, now!" On his mark, Rip powered up his device, feeling the familiar jolt in his arm, and energy shot out of the Console to a point in midair. A breach grew out from the coordinates of the Tear until it was a swirling vortex of blue and white energy.

"Breach open," Cisco reported.

Rip opened his mouth to confirm, but a sound cut through the air that turned his blood cold. The screech of a Dominator.

"THEY'RE HERE!"

Aliens bubbled out, seemingly from the ground beneath them, blasting away rubble and decrepit automobiles as claws slashed and energy weapons discharged. The resistance formation quickly dissolved into chaos as Dominator after Dominator leapt into their lines and cut through their ranks, sending up spurts of shockingly red blood as chests were slashed open or impaled.

Rip was momentarily distracted by streams of fire as Firestorm and Heatwave frantically tried to beat their attackers back, but then his eyes were drawn to two Dominators lugging devices whose appearance resembled firehoses attached to tanks strapped to their backs.

The Dominators pointed the hoses straight at Rip, who was in the awkward position of holding his arm up to maintain the breach. The Dominators pulled their triggers, and Rip ducked out of pure reflex, only realizing too late that the Dominators were not pointing at him, but rather at the vortex in front of him. Yellow and green energy streamed from the Dominators' hoses and enveloped the vortex, pulsing around the breach with ever increasing speed until it solidified into a square box of pure energy around it, extending all the way to the ground.

"What the…?" Rip tried vainly to cut the power from his Console, but the Dominators' devices seemed to have locked the breach in place. Glancing at his timer, he realized it was mere seconds before Barry was due to arrive back in 2026.

 _Three…two…one…_

With an almighty crash, a red-and-yellow streak blasted out of the vortex and smashed straight into the energy cube. Even through the din of the battle around him, Rip could hear Barry's scream of agony as sinister energy coursed through his body, and after an interminable couple of seconds, Barry's body fell limply to the ground, the vortex behind him collapsing shut.

 _Bollocks._ "Overwatch!" Rip yelled frantically into his earpiece, diving behind cover and pulling out his pistol after the breach's collapse. "The Dominators are counterattacking! We're being overrun!" Static sounded in response as he attempted to get a clear shot at the Dominators trapping Barry, and he realized he couldn't hear anyone else trying to raise Felicity on their communicators. Their signal was jammed.

All around him, resistance fighters were dying as their ranks were shred to pieces, aliens swarming everywhere. With no real option for retreat and no prospects for marshaling some fighters together in a last stand, Rip was alone, picking off Dominator after Dominator trying to get to Barry's motionless form. Probably wary of his speed, they wouldn't lower the energy cube around him and instead tried to get in close to finish him off. Rip wasn't having any of that; alien after alien fell with a charred hole through its head as the Time Master downed one after another with blue bolts of death from his pistol.

Then something heavy slammed into his head from behind, and the world went dark.

…

His team had surrendered by the time he came to. He was on his knees, leaning against a slab of concrete, carelessly tossed aside, with his hands restrained behind him. The resistance fighters who weren't dead were arranged similarly around the site, and a little ways away, he spotted Jax, Stein, and Mick. All three looked badly beaten, barely conscious as the result of being his, and Barry's, primary guards at the Tear, and Dominators were hovering close, alert to any attempt at resistance. All of their weapons had been confiscated and piled far from their reach. He could see aliens moving among human bodies, carelessly stabbing into random bodies to make sure they were dead. Usually they were. Sometimes they weren't.

Turning his head from the gruesome scene, he alighted his eyes instead on Barry's prone body. He still hadn't moved, and Rip seriously considered that perhaps the speedster had died from his collision with the energy cube. Then again, the Dominators _still_ hadn't lowered the cube. If he was dead, what was the point?

"What are you bloody _waiting_ for?" he blurted out, to no alien in particular. "Just get it over with!"

Suddenly, his vision was completely filled by a Dominator's head getting right in his face. It was as ugly as the rest: beady black eyes, diseased skin, foul stench, wickedly sharp teeth in an unnaturally wide mouth. The one feature that distinguished it from the rest was a small, white mound of scar tissue above its left eye, the result of a pair of shackles hurled at its head with blinding velocity.

 _So, this is the Superior_.

He had never met the alien Barry had nailed with his improvised fastball before, but he had heard tales of a particular Dominator's special penchant for ruthlessness, a Dominator with white scar tissue on its face. The Superior seemed to have taken it quite personally that a resident of Earth had marked it, and it took out its anger on the more helpless members of Earth's population, slaughtering humans indiscriminately, be they men, women, or children. Barry had attempted to meet him in combat multiple times to end him, but the Superior seemed well aware how outmatched it was in one-on-one combat with the Scarlet Speedster and usually found ways to divert Barry's attention long enough to save its own skin, only to pop up somewhere else on another killing spree.

Feeling reckless, angry, and most of all, helpless, Rip went with the only thought in his head. "You're even more hideous in person."

The Superior hissed. "Such impudence. Considering your failure today, it is almost laughable."

"We managed to off more of your ugly kind," Rip retorted. "That's a reward in itself."

"Such bravado. You do not care to know how your attempts to change the timeline have failed?"

Rip didn't reply.

"Surely you've noticed this timeline continues, despite the return of your heroes?"

Rip had, in fact, noticed, but he was loathe to give the Dominators the satisfaction of him realizing the absolute waste of their efforts. The Superior pointed a bony claw at the energy cube still imprisoning Barry. "Our field did more than incapacitate your agents. They analyzed the frequency of your temporal breach and the resonance field the speedsters were generating when they smashed into our barriers. By uploading these specifications to our ships in orbit, we were able to seal the rifts in our dampening field before the vortexes collapsed."

Rip shut his eyes as the weight of the Superior's words hit him. Despite their changes to the timeline, nothing would happen now with the dampening field completely sealed. It was like stretching back a rubber band. Until the thing holding it back was taken away, the rubber band could never snap back.

He also couldn't help noticing the Superior's usage of "speedsters." Plural. So Wally and the second team had been beaten as well.

The Superior let out a higher-pitched hissing that Rip figured was laughter. "I suppose I should thank you for helping us discover cracks in our chrono-spatial field. Your actions created ripples that led us right to them," it taunted. "However, what I'm really grateful for are the metahumans you've gift-wrapped for us. What do you rebels call them? The 'Scarlet Speedster'? The 'Nuclear Man'?"

"Keep your hands off of them," Rip growled.

"I don't think so," the Superior replied coolly. "We haven't determined the optimal way to exterminate the metahuman contagion yet, and they'll make excellent test samples. As for the non-powered ones, well," it chuckled, "you'll still prove useful to keep the metahumans…compliant."

Rip would sooner die than allow himself, Mick, or anyone else to be used as bargaining chips to coerce Stein, Jax, or even Barry, but before he could plot how to rob the Dominators of that particular satisfaction, a number of objects suddenly fell from the sky, interspersed among the aliens. Arrows.

The Time Master's ears rang as explosions rocked the ruined city square, and the air filled with alien screams as Dominators clutched burned faces and limbs. More arrows followed the first volley, a combination of smoke bombs and flash grenades that sowed chaos among the Dominators. The Superior narrowed its eyes at Rip before backing away.

"Perhaps we will cut our losses after all." It turned its head to the side, screaming. "KILL THEM ALL!"

Rip's eyes followed the Superior's. It was looking right at the crumpled bodies of Stein, Jax, and Mick.

" _No! Wait!_ " Rip lunged forward, hands still cuffed behind him, but he was much, much too far away to do anything. Seemingly in slow motion, he watched as the Dominators guarding the three of them extended claws from their wrists and ran each of the Legends through the chest, the claws emerging on the other side covered in blood. A scream lodged in his throat, Rip saw all three bodies go rigid for a moment and then, as they exhaled their final breaths, sag lifelessly to the ground.

Blind with rage, Rip got to his feet and wheeled around to face where the Superior had been, " _Bastard_ —"

Which is all he got out, for while the Superior had vanished, another Dominator had stepped forward and grabbed him by the throat, lifting him into the air with one hand. It drew back its other hand, a claw slowly extending, and just like the cliché that had endured throughout centuries of humanity, he saw flashes of his life before his eyes.

 _His kiss with Miranda after she insisted he continue in his quest to become a Time Master._

 _The holovideo of Jonas telling his father he missed him._

 _The feel of his family's bodies in his arms as they lay dead, slaughtered by a madman._

 _The shocking nobility of Mick Rory knocking out Ray so that Ray wouldn't have to die destroying the Oculus._

 _The tears he wiped from Sara's face as he made her believe in her own strength, with or without her sister._

 _The choice he made to fly a meteorite into the Sun to ensure his team survived his crusade against Vandal Savage._

 _I'm ready_ , he thought to himself, waiting for the thrust through his own chest, but as fate or as luck would have it, it was not to be. An arrow flew out of the sky into his enemy's skull, crumpling its body to the ground, and Rip fell to his knees, coughing and heaving.

On the edge of his vision, two boots hit the ground from above before disappearing behind him. A moment later, his hands came free as his restraints were sliced in half, and he rose to his feet to greet his savior.

"Are you alright?" Thea shouted above the din of fighting, the double-quiver at her back already half-empty from the multitude of arrows she had unleashed.

Rip nodded numbly, unable to say a word as his head turned against his will towards the bodies across the courtyard. Jax. Stein. Mick. All dead.

He knew he should be mentioning something, but it took his brain a moment before he could articulate it. "Mr. Allen…" he began, struggling to form words. "He's…" he stammered, but so overcome as he was from the death of his teammates, of his Legends, he could only vaguely gesture in the direction he had last seen Barry's unconscious body.

"Oliver's got him. He shot down the Dominators keeping him prisoner," she reassured him. "We need to get out of here."

He moved automatically towards the bodies. "What? No, I've—"

"Rip, I'm sorry. There's nothing we can do for them now!," Thea urged, having to yell to make herself understood. "We have to go while they're still off balance."

"I…I can't…"

"Come on!" Thea finally insisted, grabbing the crook of Rip's arm and dragging him away. His senses vaguely detected resistance fighters on cars and motorcycles, unloading clip after clip into the aliens, spraying their yellow blood across the streets of Central City while others hauled the wounded to safety. A hulking form chased him and Thea through the streets, and it took several seconds for him to realize that Oliver was running with Barry's body slung over his shoulder, fireman-style. Between the fire and the smoke, and the blood, and the gunfire, and his eyes, everything simply blurred.

…

"As far as we can tell, it was through the sewers."

Diggle had taken it upon himself to bring everyone up to speed, even though they had all heard enough bits and pieces to understand how disastrously their situation had turned. All the survivors of their mission to change the timeline had retreated back to their underground hideout outside the limits of Central City, but they were sure such a massive movement had not gone unnoticed by the Dominators. They were preparing to separate back to their individual resistance cells and abandon the base, but at the same time their grief was virtually paralyzing.

"Oliver and Thea saw a bunch of manhole covers flipped over and large cratered holes near Central City's subway stations," Diggle explained, a somber, defeated tone inflecting his voice. "We think the Dominators had a system in place to allow them to move quickly to anywhere in the city. Whether they actually knew about the Tears beforehand or not, that's how they responded so fast to our operations."

He wasn't sure how many of them were listening. Oliver, a deadened and shocked gaze in his eyes, had his arm around Thea as she leaned forward, her elbows on her knees and her hands covering her face. Felicity was openly crying as she gripped tightly to Barry's hand as he lay recovering, though awake, on a gurney. Rip sat on a crate, his head down and his hands clutching his hair as if he would pull it all out at any moment.

"When Felicity alerted us that communications to you guys at the Tears had been cut off, we feared the worst," Diggle continued. "We split our forces up to try for a rescue. Oliver and Thea went downtown. Caitlin and I went to the river." He paused a moment, knowing the hardest parts were coming. "It was bad. We tried to save as many people as we could, but by the time we got there…," he trailed off.

Diggle saw Rip's hands tighten further on his hair. Barry's and Oliver's eyes were shut. Felicity gripped Barry tighter, and Thea was shaking.

Sara. Ray. Amaya. Cisco. They had all fallen, along with many of the resistance fighters at the river.

All of the Legends were dead except for Rip.

Cisco was dead.

"We barely got Wally out of there," Diggle resumed. "Cisco and the Legends protected him until the end."

"Will he be okay?" Barry finally asked, barely able to speak since his run-in with the energy cube had severely drained and injured him. There was a haunted look in his eyes, had been since he had learned of Cisco's death.

"We're not sure," Diggle admitted. "Apparently the only words they could get out of him was that he did it. He did what he was supposed to do when he ran back in time. Then he lost consciousness."

"He's never time traveled before," Felicity pointed out, her voice still strained from her tears. "It probably took everything out of him."

Barry gave a tiny nod, looking more miserable, which made Diggle's next bit of news even harder. "There's, uh…there's more bad news," Diggle ventured, looking at Barry. "Caitlin's gone."

Barry closed his eyes, and he turned into Felicity, who had leaned into him, and buried his face in her shoulder. It was Thea who pulled her hands away, her eyes red, and asked, "She was killed too?"

"No," Diggle replied shaking his head. "She's _gone_. She bolted, killing any human or Dominator that got in her way."

Barry's head turned back around slowly. "How…why…?"

A sigh from Diggle. "I can't be sure, Barry, but I think…I think when we got there, and she saw Cisco's body, she lost it. Whatever war she and Killer Frost were having, Killer Frost won it. After that, it was all about self-preservation for her."

Diggle watched somberly as Barry absorbed that latest bit of tragedy. As miserable as Diggle felt at the loss of his friends, he couldn't even imagine how the rest of them were feeling. These past ten years had seen him as a liaison between various resistance forces, keeping him on the move, but Sara had spent the time fighting alongside Oliver, Thea, and Felicity in Star City. Cisco, Caitlin, Jax, and Stein had been huge contributors to the resistance in Central City. Ray, Mick, and Amaya had spent most of their time with Rip. Rip seemed to be the most shell-shocked, having lost his entire Legends team, a team that, from what he had heard, Rip had always hoped would come back together.

Diggle pushed through to finish his update, although he doubted anyone was listening anymore. After he and Oliver had split their troops in half, Oliver's force had used every remaining car and motorcycle to speed away from the Dominator's staging area in order to attempt a rescue, and trying to catch the Dominators by surprise, he and Thea charged ahead of the main force with an absurdly dangerous maneuver. Using a series of grappling arrows, the two swung from building to building, flying through the air countless meters above the ground like bats out of hell until they had reached the rooftops overlooking the downtown Tear. Their explosive and smoke bomb arrows had sown enough chaos to mask the approach of the resistance vehicles barreling in for a rescue, but unfortunately, their efforts hadn't been fast enough to save the Legends either, outside of Rip.

"Of course." Rip spoke for the first time in a dead, sarcastic voice when Diggle finished. "You had to make sure the _speedster_ survived, didn't you, everyone else be damned?"

"It wasn't like that," Thea insisted, her voice thick. "We could see Barry because of the energy cube around him. Stein and Jax and Mick and you…we couldn't pick you out individually while grappling from the rooftops."

"They died. I lived," Rip deadpanned.

"I…" Thea shrugged helplessly. It was clear she didn't want to say aloud that the arrow that saved Rip had been pure luck. It was a callous thought, but Diggle had served long enough in the military to recognize survivor's guilt, and he suspected that Rip knew she and Oliver had simply been trying to save as many people as they could. His grudge wasn't with the archers.

An uncomfortable silence spanned a few seconds before Diggle broke it, this time to address the one point on which he was less clear. "So Wally and Barry succeeded in changing time, but the Dominators sealed the Tears. Does this mean history can't reset?"

He, Oliver, Felicity, and Thea looked to Rip, the only one left qualified to answer. Rip nodded, quiet fury in his eyes. "It was a waste."

"Rip…" Barry began in a low, pained voice.

"No," Rip cut him off, holding a finger up to him. "I've had enough of you." He turned to the rest of the group. "I _warned_ you all that it could be a trap, but once again, you were all so eager to put our fates in _his_ hands."

"This isn't just on Barry," Oliver countered. "We all made this choice."

"Yes, because you trusted that the Tears _he_ created would be our salvation," he retorted bitingly. "And the Legends paid the price."

"You're not the only one who cared about them!" Thea snapped.

"And they're not the only ones we lost!" Felicity added angrily.

"No, you're right," Rip agreed, getting worked up as well. "Countless resistance fighters are dead. Cisco lost his life. Caitlin lost her soul. Wally was forced into a situation he wasn't ready for. And for what?!" he shouted at the end. "Our timeline hasn't changed. Was anything even accomplished at the staging area?" he demanded, wheeling to face Diggle and Oliver.

Oliver sighed heavily. "No. The staging area was more heavily fortified than we thought. It looks like they're in the early stages of building something big. We couldn't make much of a dent before we had to pull out for the rescue."

Rip huffed humorlessly. "So as I said: a waste."

"Rip," Barry began again, still in a small and quiet voice. "I'm sorry."

"Oh, you're _sorry_?" Rip asked sarcastically. Given everyone's high emotions, Diggle was taking it upon himself to make sure everyone kept themselves in check, and to him Rip was clearly on the edge of losing it. "When have I heard that before?"

"Rip," Diggle began, trying to defuse him. "Believe me, we all feel your pain. I know how much you cared about them. They were family to us, too."

Rip locked gazes with Diggle, the misery apparent in his eyes, and only then did Diggle notice that, without meaning to, the group had oriented itself so that he, Oliver, Thea, Barry, and Felicity were all sitting more or less on one side, while Rip stood at the other. He was a man out of his time, and the war had only led him to clutch at the relationships he had formed on the Waverider all the more tightly, relationships that were now all extinguished. The loneliness of his solitary figure was striking.

As he held Rip's gaze, Diggle could see Rip also notice the dichotomy, and the fight in him appeared to dim. He turned around, seemingly unable to face them anymore. "Yes," he agreed quietly. "They were."

He began to walk away, heading out of the hideout. Diggle called after him, "Where're you going?"

"Perhaps Doctor Snow had the right idea," Rip called back. "Maybe all that matters is survival."


	8. Chapter 8

Present, 2056 (Occupation)

"…and so the staging area in Central City is really a power station," Felicity finished. "If we destroy it, we might finally be free of all this."

Rip was silent as he considered the information Felicity had relayed. Barry stood to the side, careful to keep his participation to a minimum. The former Time Master still wore that long brown coat, despite the fact it was practically in shreds after decades of use. The man had aged savagely, with scars and wrinkles crisscrossing his face. His hair and beard, both barely kempt, had gone mostly grey.

Shaking his head, Rip muttered, "I always wondered how the Dominator ships had enough power to maintain the chrono-spatial field this long."

"Looks like their power supplies are finite, just like anything else," Felicity agreed. "The station seems to be using the ships as conduits now to keep the field going."

"So if you take out the station…"

"…the field loses its power source."

Rip considered for a moment. "And then those changes we made to the timeline all those years ago finally break through."

"That's the idea," Felicity confirmed.

Rip tilted his head back for a moment, then shook his head ruefully. "Well, this is all very interesting, but as you may have noticed, humanity's lost this fight. There's no taking back the Earth now."

"No. We're not giving up," Barry said, chiming in for the first time. "I'm going to destroy the station. Oliver found a way in for me."

" _You're_ going to destroy the station? All by your lonesome?" Rip asked, contempt evident in his face and voice.

"If I have to."

"Of course. You've about run out of allies to sacrifice, haven't you?"

Barry saw Felicity wince as the conversation took the turn they were all expecting, but he strove not to take the bait, instead continuing to match Rip's stare. A few seconds of silence passed before Rip asked the obvious question. "So why come to me?"

"They're still too many Dominators guarding the station. I need a distraction."

Rip rolled his eyes and chuckled. "I stand corrected. Apparently you _do_ still have some people left to sacrifice."

Barry sighed, but figured he should at least get his intentions out in the open. "I want to use your Console to try to produce a breach."

"You've haven't taken the field down yet. It won't work."

"No, but it would still create a ripple in the Dominator's dampening field and draw their attention."

"And bring a horde of aliens down on my back."

"I could speed you to safety before that happens and then be on my way to the power station."

"Forgive me if I find your promises less than reassuring." Rip turned away from Barry and strode slowly to the other end of the Bunker, as if he couldn't stand to look at him anymore.

Barry tried again. "Look Rip. I know you blame me for their deaths. I do, too. But we have another chance to end all of this. Erase this timeline. Erase their deaths. Erase everyone's deaths. I need your help to do that."

Rip turned around slowly, contempt in his eyes. "It's amazing that after decades, you still can't understand." He walked right up to Barry, getting in his face. "I am _done_ being the chess piece of a speedster, Mr. Allen."

"Barry's _trying_ to save the Earth," Felicity said, exasperated. "It's not his fault other people want to fight for it too!"

"And yet everyone suffers for his decisions," Rip sneered. "You tried to fix things by changing history through the Tears, and my whole team _died_ for it."

Barry didn't say a word. There was nothing he could say that he hadn't before.

"You created Flashpoint, and the Dominators invaded as a result. Not to mention your friends either lost a family member or developed a psychotic split personality."

More silence.

"Again and again, you've gone back in time to _fix_ things. To make things _better_. Inevitably, someone else suffers due to your constant desire to play at being a god."

"I'm not a god."

"Really? Because you have the same disregard as one," Rip accused, pointing a finger at Barry's face. "Greek gods, Egyptian gods, Norse gods," he continued, waving his arms around as he became more animated, "their stories always involved them doing what their impulses dictated, innocents be damned. They'd even occasionally deign to give us mere mortals a glimmer of hope, just to snatch it away."

"I think you're stretching the 'god' metaphor a little thin," Felicity retorted acidly.

In response, Rip fixed Barry with the longest, more withering stare yet in all the time they had known each other. From the very beginning, since Rip had first appeared in Barry's lab to warn him against pursuing the Legends as they left to fight Vandal Savage, there had always been a seed of mistrust and anger that Barry could feel Rip directing at him. Barry had always assumed that the Time Master was a stodgy stickler for the rules and that his various encounters with time travel offended Rip's sensibilities. Now, forty years since that encounter and everyone far past the end of their rope, Barry finally took the opportunity to see if something else was at play.

"Rip," he began, tired and weary. "What aren't you telling me?"

Barry could tell Rip was waging an internal war with himself. Whatever was on the tip of his tongue, he had refrained from telling Barry, and likely anyone, for decades. The man, already known for keeping things close to the chest, had chosen of all places Oliver Queen's abandoned Bunker as his place of residence while the Earth collapsed around him. Felicity had mentioned Ray talking about the Legends once traveling to Star City in the year 2046 in an alternate timeline that was now no more. They had encountered both the Bunker and a sixty-plus year-old Oliver in that timeline, and Rip had apparently used his memories of that trip to help cut himself off from the world.

Finally, Rip stepped back from Barry for a couple steps and reached into his coat pocket. When he withdrew his hand, Barry saw a small pouch of a material he had never seen before and watched as Rip handed it to him without a word before turning around and walking to the opposite end of the Bunker.

Barry couldn't describe the material he was holding, but he got the impression that it was some sort of environment-proof pouch meant to preserve whatever was inside it. Opening the latch, he saw that there was a single, folded piece of paper inside, clearly old but reasonably well preserved. He took it out, unfolded it, and read.

His hand shook.

March, 2166 (Prelude)

Quiet.

Fires burned in the wreckage all around him. People were running in the night, and children were crying. Explosions rocked in the distance, but in his mind all he could hear was quiet.

His wife. His son. Lifeless in his arms as they sat together in the grass.

They wouldn't respond to his arms squeezing them close. His son didn't reciprocate a light kiss on his head.

His throat tore itself apart as he screamed into the silence. He couldn't hear it. They didn't respond.

There was no point to this anymore. He couldn't change it, any of it. No hope. No happiness. He was alone, now until the end of his life.

His thoughts strayed to the gun in his pocket. One shot, and he wouldn't have to be alone anymore. He could join his family right here, and be with them right now.

Gently, oh so gently, he took his right arm from around his wife's body, careful not to disturb her as she rested. In his coat pocket, his hand found the cool, reassuring grip of the weapon, a custom design that hid advanced power cells under the guise of a simple revolver. He withdrew it slowly, noting in a disconnected fog how steady his hand was, and put the barrel to his temple. Slowly, his eyes fluttered shut, and he focused on the weight of his wife and his son against his body as his finger tightened on the trigger.

Suddenly, a bright blue light shone through his eyelids, startling him enough to momentarily relax his right hand as his eyes opened. In front of him was a swirling vortex of flashing blue and white energy, backlighting the figure of a bald man standing in front of him with his hands outstretched. No, not bald. Was he wearing a mask?

All at once, his hearing snapped back, and he registered shouting. "Stop! Rip, stop!" the man urged.

Stunned by the sheer oddness of the scene, Rip simply stared, his gun held to his temple, until the bright vortex disappeared, leaving the man in front of him lit only by the small fires burning the wreckages around them. The red suit and lightning-bolt insignias were unmistakable.

"Rip," the man began again, "put the gun down. I don't want to have to take it from you."

Rip's mind scrambled desperately through his past training and studies to remember any mention of his arrival in this time period, but it was coming up empty. Without anything else to go on, he replied, "I know you."

"I know you do," the man replied, bringing his hands up to pull off the mask on his face.

"The Flash," Rip breathed. "Barry Allen."

He looked to be in his mid-thirties, though with a speedster's healing powers, he could easily be older. The Time Master attitude towards speedsters was clear, but the arrival of one in the flesh was still a sight to behold. He continued to stare as Barry walked slowly towards him, an expression of genuine sorrow on his face. The revolver in his hand slowly sank to the ground.

Barry knelt in front of him, in front of his family. "Rip," he began, "I'm so, so sorry."

For a few blessed moments, Rip's mind had been given something to focus on other than the deaths of his wife and son, but that reality crashed back into his consciousness as he looked down at the bodies he was still cradling. Having someone say he was "sorry" felt so inadequate that he had no response. Instead, he choked out the obvious question. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm here to help you," Barry began, reaching into the back of his belt with one hand.

Immediately, Rip's hand had released the revolver and snatched out to grab Barry by the shoulder. His mind had raced to the possibilities the Flash's arrival opened up so quickly that his hand reacted without conscious thought. "You're going to help me save them?"

Initially startled by Rip's grip on his shoulder, Barry sadly shook his head. "No, Rip. I can't do that."

"You're a speedster! You can run me back in time! Change the future!" Rip urged desperately.

"You know the laws of time. You know you can't do that."

"I can't, but you can! The laws don't apply to you! You're a _speedster_!"

"The Time Masters wouldn't approve of you changing the timeline like that, Rip."

"I don't give a _damn_ about the Time Masters' rules!" Rip shouted into Barry's face, gripping his shoulder more tightly and even physically dragging the speedster's face closer to his own. "Savage _slaughtered_ my family! I have to save them!"

Barry slowly shook his head, profound sadness in his eyes as he reached up and gently pried Rip's grip off of him. "I can't do this for you. I won't."

In a rage, Rip snatched up the revolver and pressed the barrel against Barry's head. If he wasn't going to help him save Miranda, save Jonas, what _good_ was he? "Then _why_ are you here?!" he screamed into Barry's face, his hand now trembling in grief as he held the gun and felt his moral compass completely abandon him.

"Like I said," Barry replied, utterly calm despite the gun at his forehead and pulling his hand from behind his back to reveal a piece of paper, "I'm here to help you."

Present, 2056 (Occupation)

"You met Barry in the future," Felicity breathed, as Rip finished telling his story. Barry still sat to the side, staring at the piece of paper Rip had given him.

"In _your_ future," Rip corrected gruffly. "In _my_ past. At least, the past that I had before Flashpoint occurred. Before any of this," he gestured, waving at the decrepit, ruined state of the Bunker and implying the Dominator invasion in general, "occurred."

"And all this time," Felicity pieced together, thinking over all the years of disagreements between these two men, "you've been against Barry not because he broke the rules, but because he wouldn't break them for _you_. To save your family."

Rip huffed. "All the times he violated the integrity of time for his own happiness, but when someone _else's_ family is on the line, he's suddenly a rule follower."

"And so you couldn't save your family, and you've had a grudge against him this whole time," Felicity finished, sitting back on the table behind her in disbelief. She couldn't think this whole time travel business between the two of them could get any more convoluted.

Of course, she was wrong.

"What is this?" Barry asked quietly, holding up the piece of paper. Felicity hadn't read it yet, too engrossed as she had been by Rip's story. Felicity got the distinct feeling Barry knew exactly what it was and was simply having his worst fears confirmed.

Rip replied, in a deadly quiet voice, " _That_ was your idea of 'helping me.' You said that," he continued, pointing at the paper, "was how I could make things right."

Curious, Felicity walked across the Bunker and took the paper out of Barry's motionless hand. Flipping it over, puzzled, she saw it was a list.

 _Raymond Palmer_

 _Sara Lance_

 _Jefferson Jackson_

 _Martin Stein_

 _Kendra Saunders_

 _Carter Hall_

 _Leonard Snart_

 _Mick Rory_

"The Legends?" Felicity asked, bewildered. "What does…this…?" she trailed off, head swiveling back and forth between Barry and Rip, realization dawning on her.

"It's in my handwriting," Barry confirmed quietly.

"You…" Felicity struggled, her brain frantically trying to catch up before finally turning to Rip, "you got the idea for the Legends from _Barry_?"

A grim nod was her answer. "Mr. Allen was the one who told me to recruit a team, travel through time using the Waverider, and stop Vandal Savage. Make up any story I had to in order to hide from Sara, Ray, and the rest the real reason I had picked their names to limit their knowledge of the future and _preserve the timeline_ ," Rip snorted humorlessly, clearly fed up with the laws of time. "He conveniently left out that pursuing justice still wouldn't bring my family back."

Felicity, flipping between Rip's quiet rage and Barry's devastation, could muster no direct reply, continuing instead to stare at the paper in her hand. To no one in particular, she muttered, "I always thought it was weird a time traveler would recruit his whole team from the same year."

Rip, now on a roll, ignored this. "The most tortuous detail of all," he picked up again, "is that in refusing to save my wife and son, he did, in his own way, give me a new family. We had our squabbles and our differences, but as far as I was still capable of caring, I cared for each and every one of them."

He turned away from Felicity for a moment, and she heard a quiet sniff and saw him cover his eyes with one hand, surreptitiously wiping at them, before he continued. "Losing Snart made me question my capabilities as a captain more than anything else, and losing Kendra and Carter in the middle of the war was bad enough. Then, that day…" he trailed off.

"At the Tears?" Felicity asked hesitantly.

A nod. "When Sara…and Ray…and Jax…and Mick and Martin and Amaya…when they all died for _his_ mission," he snarled, leaving no doubt to whom "his" referred to as Barry put both of his hands to his face, "I lost my family all over again," he said, rubbing his mouth with his hand.

Silence followed, with there being absolutely nothing Felicity or Barry could say. Rip shook his head in frustration. "I understand that we've all lost everything. I am sorry for Oliver's death, Felicity. I know how much he meant to you." Felicity's mouth tightened for a moment, not wanting to deal with a pain so fresh. "But _you_ …," Rip continued, heat growing in his voice again as he began stalking toward Barry, "…you wouldn't help me save my wife and son, and then you have the audacity to give me a new family in the Legends, only to take them away from me?"

Barry wouldn't meet Rip's eyes, his face in his hands as his elbows rested on his knees. It was impossible for Felicity to not understand the rage flowing off Rip, but she also knew Barry enough to know how awful he was feeling, and that not everything Rip said was fair. "They all fought for freedom, Rip," she tried gently. "They accepted the risks, and they fought anyway."

"All so the _speedster_ could save the day?" Rip asked sarcastically. "I ask you again: Is that all we are to you, Mr. Allen? The playthings of a man trying to be a god?"

Finally, Barry raised his face from his hands, a look of misery on his face. "I don't know what to say, Rip."

A humorless chuckle. "There's nothing you can say." Rip turned and sauntered back to the opposite end of the Bunker, seeming to want as much distance as possible from Barry. Felicity didn't know what to do and was just debating whether she and Barry should quietly get up and leave when Rip spoke again. "I suppose it really is the end of times, if I've actually bothered to tell you all this," he remarked. She heard a ripping sound, like Velcro being pulled off, and suddenly a metallic object was flying at her chest. She bobbled it in surprise before securing it in her hands, realizing it to be Gideon's backup mainframe. Rip's Console.

"I'm not interested in your suicide mission, but you're welcome to that," he said, gesturing at the device, "if you think it'll help. It's still advanced technology compared to now and should have enough power for what you want."

"Thank you, Rip," Felicity said softly.

"I'm only doing it because now there's no reason for you to ever return here," he replied curtly, walking into the shadows. "You found your way in. You can find your way out."

…

"Well, Rip was right. There's just enough power left in the Console to attempt one more breach opening," Felicity declared, tinkering with the device Rip had bequeathed to her.

Barry nodded absently, only half listening. His mind was full of tortuous thoughts following Rip's multiple revelations. In a way, everything Rip revealed was moot, as it was from a timeline that didn't exist anymore, but these events had nevertheless had a formative effect on Rip's life, and Barry was inextricably entwined in them all.

"It's no use blaming yourself, you know," Felicity remarked, not looking up from the bench in the Foundry where she worked. "You didn't kill Rip's family, and you didn't kill the Legends."

"I know," Barry said, in a frustrated sigh. "It's just…people die when I take action, people like the Legends. And," he continued, "people die when I do nothing, like Rip's family. I lose in every scenario."

"For fuck's sake, Barry," Felicity sighed, in an irritated mutter, "after four decades of an alien invasion, you're really still going to try to pin everything bad that's ever happened on yourself? Look around, Scarlet Speedster. Our whole planet's in the dump."

Barry tilted his head, conceding Felicity's point. There was a time, many years ago, when she probably would have handled him a little more delicately. That time was long gone.

"It's all in the past now…or the future…or some random alternate timeline," Felicity groaned at the absurd complexity of their lives. "What matters now is that we have an opportunity, and we need to take it."

It wasn't hard to see Felicity's brusque logic, and Barry knew she was right. Still, as she continued to tinker with the Console, an idea grew in the back of his mind. It wasn't strictly necessary for their objective, but given how far back his strained relationship with Rip went, he wanted to give it a try, in order to cover his bases as much as possible to rewrite their current history. Plus, it would ease his conscience. Somewhat.

"Yeah," he said aloud to Felicity. "You're right."

"I know I am."

"One question though. Do you think you'd be able to set up the Console to transmit a message through time?"

"Barry, we're only _pretending_ to open a breach to distract the Dominators. We can't actually get one open through their dampening field."

"No, but when the field comes down entirely, the way would be clear."

"Would there be enough time?"

"History won't reset immediately. The changes we made will take a bit to catch up," Barry replied, having absorbed some expertise from listening to Stein, Ray, and Rip over the years.

"Hmmm," Felicity muttered, checking some components of the Console, "I think we can do that. Why? What message do you want to send?"

"A warning."

…

Barry walked to a corner of the Foundry as Felicity continued making the necessary modifications to the Console. In his hand was a simple device for voice recordings, from which he would transfer the message to the Console afterwards. For a few moments he simply palmed the device, trying to decide what he wanted to say.

He had no idea, even if he succeeded in changing history, how the new timeline would play out. What he felt certain of, however, was that Rip's revelations were proof that he, Barry, needed to make sure someone in the past was aware of his actions as the Flash and how those actions contributed to the problem of the Dominators. That person needed to understand the implications and have the expertise to respond, making his choice obvious.

He pressed a button on the recorder. "Sorry to contact you like this, Captain Hunter," he began, "but I can't risk putting any more lives in danger." Pausing for a moment, he felt sure, based on everything he now knew, that Rip would not be pleased to have any correspondence with the Scarlet Speedster, but watching Oliver's funeral and hearing Rip's confession only motivated him further to warn the past of the apocalypse he was trying to prevent.

He continued. "And neither can this, which is why you'll keep what I'm about to tell you a secret, even from the rest of your team." Rip would understand the dangers of too many people knowing too much about the future.

Taking a deep breath, he got into the meat of his message. "A war is coming, Captain Hunter, and at some point you're gonna be called back to Central City to fight it. So you need to know that while you and your team have been in the Temporal Zone, I made a choice that affected the timeline. As you know, whenever you alter the past, those changes affect the present and get compounded in the future. When you return, you will be in the new timeline I created, where everyone's past and everyone's future has been affected, including yours. When you come back, don't trust anything or anyone. Not even me."

After a few seconds, he clicked a button to turn off the recorder and sighed. The end of the message came out far more dire and self-loathing than he had intended. Regardless of what Felicity said, he still felt the weight of loss on his shoulders. Rip's personal losses. The world's losses to the Dominators. He realized he may have subconsciously chosen Rip to be the recipient of the message because he knew Rip, more than anyone else, would hold him in the highest suspicion and maybe prevent him from decisions that would cost lives. Maybe the Legends would survive. Maybe Caitlin wouldn't run. Maybe Cisco would live.

Still, a little needling thought poked at his brain. He tried to see the message from Rip's point of view and wondered if he would just discard it out of hand as some random troublemaking by the Flash. A part of him also knew there was something else he just needed to say, so to be sure, he turned the recorder back on.

…

"You're sure I can't convince you to take me with you?" Felicity sighed, handing over the Console to Barry, all the modifications complete.

Barry shook his head. "I should do this alone," he replied, strapping the device to his wrist.

"Oliver used to say that a lot."

Barry didn't contradict her. Instead he walked up to her and slowly rested his hands on her shoulders. "We both know this is a one-way trip," he began. "I can do this on my own."

"Trying to produce a breach is going to sap most of your strength. Even if you get away, you won't have much left to infiltrate the power station in Central City."

"I have to try," Barry countered. "Rip was right about one thing. Enough people have died."

"And I don't get a chance to die for my planet too?"

"Felicity," Barry said again, gripping her shoulders tightly, "Star City is your home. Whatever happens, whether this works or not, you know you'll always want to save your city. Just like Oliver did."

Felicity lowered her head, knowing that nothing she said to that would convince him otherwise, and in the ruins of 2056, there was simply no mode of transportation left she could use to keep up with him if he didn't carry her. He pulled her gently into one last hug. "Star City is where you belong. Just like Central City is where I belong."

She nodded her head against his body as she gripped him tightly. When he pulled away, they shared one final, long look, the lines and grey hairs fading away for the briefest of seconds. For a moment, they were young again, staring affectionately as they sat across from each other on a train that connected the homes they once knew. "Good luck," she told him softly.

He nodded. "Bye Felicity," he whispered. A blaze of red and yellow light, and he was gone.

"Bye Barry," she whispered back.

…

 _Author's notes: References and lines are taken from DC's Legends of Tomorrow 1x06, "Star City 2046."_

 _Barry's message is straight from DC's Legends of Tomorrow 2x03, "Shogun," and The Flash 3x08, "Invasion!"_


	9. Chapter 9

Present, 2056 (Occupation)

 _Dammit_.

Barry sank to one knee, feeling his energy drain after attempting to open a breach with Rip's Console strapped to his wrist. As expected, the familiar blue-and-white vortex was instead replaced by a formless, bluish mass of sparkling energy that fizzled for a few seconds before dying out completely. With no Tear created by a past breach, the dampening field could not be penetrated.

 _That really takes it out of you_ , Barry thought, slowly rising back to his feet. He felt like he had just run a few dozen marathons on an empty stomach, and he was slightly dizzy as he turned around, looking at the pure white beam of energy rising up to the sky in the distance.

Since the failed attack on what he and Oliver thought was a Dominator staging area in Central City thirty years ago, the compound had slowly fortified itself into the power station that had kept the dampening field up for the past ten years or so, when the ships in orbit apparently ran out of power. Through years of infiltrating human-populated labor camps run by the Dominators, Oliver had discovered that the beam from the power station provided energy to the field, using the dead ships as conduits. No beam, no field.

Barry had chosen to perform his breach diversion on the other side of Central City, and he could already faintly hear the shrieks of Dominator patrols closing on his position. Hopefully, that would soften up the defenses around the station.

He took a deep breath. _Okay Oliver. I guess it's up to you now_ , he thought. His final conversation with the Green Arrow had been about details on the power station's surroundings and how Barry could infiltrate it with a combination of stealth, speed, and phasing. Oliver had literally died to get him that crucial intelligence, and now Barry was about to put it to the test.

As the Dominator shrieks grew louder around him, he sped away.

…

After an interminable series of quiet superspeeding, waiting for guards to pass, and vibrating through walls, Barry found himself in the center of the power station. He wished he had asked Oliver how in the world he had managed to give Barry such precise directions and recommendations, including which walls to vibrate through, but he supposed it was yet another secret he would never know about him.

The most dominant feature was the white energy column pulsating in the center of the room. The space was large, roughly the size of a school gymnasium, but the room itself was hemispherical with the walls constantly curving towards a large circular panel in the center of the roof. In the floor directly beneath it was an identical panel, and it was through these that the energy beam, clearly visible from the outside, was projected. Barry lost a few seconds as he marveled at the swirling cylinder of energy that rose from the floor, up to the roof, and outwards to the sky above before noticing the control console protruding out of the floor panel. He almost sped towards the blinking console to deactivate the energy beam before hastily stopping himself, remembering how many times he had run into invisible barriers in this war with the Dominators.

The walls and floor were all of a brownish red metal, like rusted steel, and light in the room came from an even distribution of lights around the dome. Carefully, he made his way forward towards the energy beam and the console that controlled it, picking up a small rusty screw that was lying on the ground along the way. Tossing it at the white energy beam, he was unsurprised to watch the screw vaporize against an invisible force field several feet radially outward from the energy column.

"So, you've learned."

Forty years ago, Barry would have been startled, but by now he recognized the taunting hiss in his mind too well. Tipping his head back and rolling his eyes, he slowly turned on the spot, facing a Dominator with white scar tissue over its eye. "You again, huh?" he asked.

The Superior snarled. "You should be more afraid."

"Why? You've always found ways to avoid fighting me. Locking me up in force fields. Running away. I'm in my sixties, and I can still take you out."

In response, the Superior raised a hand to reveal a remote with a single, large button, which it pressed slowly and deliberately. Barry heard a low hum all around him, and the floor and walls thrummed with some unseen energy. He shook his head. "Am I supposed to know what that is?"

The alien crushed the remote to pieces in its hand. "I've activated generators embedded in the dome to produce a force field just under all the plates in this room, both in the walls and in the floor." The Superior sniffed, amused. "You've run into a trap yet again."

Barry had just enough time to register that this meant no more vibrating through walls for him when the Superior suddenly disappeared, only to reappear directly in front of him, its clawed hand around his throat.

"Am I running now, Flash?" it taunted, eyes narrowed.

Barry's eyes widened in shock. _How'd it do that?_

The Superior lifted Barry into the air as he grappled uselessly at the alien grip around his neck, seemed to revel in how vulnerable a position Barry was in, before flinging his body several yards, leaving him to a hard impact against the metallic floor. He barely got to his knees when a stream of dark red-orange energy flew at him from the Superior's hands, and it took an immediate burst of superspeed to avoid getting cooked. Barry quickly switched direction and made a beeline for the alien, but once again the Superior disappeared. Confused, Barry came to a stop and looked around frantically, only realizing the Dominator had reappeared behind him when two projectiles came screaming at his head. He hit the ground, and the projectiles embedded themselves in the wall behind him. Looking up, he saw that they were thin and rectangular, largely featureless, except their color was the same shade as of a Dominator's skin, and their distinctive shape reminded him of playing cards.

 _Wait a minute…_

A sinking realization settled in the pit of Barry's stomach. "What did you do?" he whispered. Getting to his feet, hands balled into fists, he screamed at his alien tormentor. " _What did you do?!_ "

A hissing chuckle. "The fastest man alive finally catches up." The alien disappeared yet again, but this time Barry immediately sped away, dodging a clawed hand as the alien reappeared in the blink of an eye.

 _Peek-a-Boo._

More razor sharp projectiles whirled just past his head.

 _Double Down_.

Streams of red-orange energy pursued him as he fled away, sideways, and backwards around the room.

 _Tokamak_.

The Superior had harnessed metahuman powers.

…

 _Shit_.

Barry lay on the ground, having gotten winged by a Tokamak blast from the Superior. He felt an odd dip in his strength, and his mind raced back to the football stadium in which he and Jax had fought the meta. _Right. He can suck energy out of power sources_.

The Dominator menacingly sauntered towards him, pulling new Double Down cards from within its own skin. "How does it feel Flash, to finally face your superior?" It flung the cards at deadly velocity towards Barry, but the speedster got to his feet and zoomed away, putting distance between himself and the alien.

"How?" he called out, outraged. "Why?"

"Most of my brethren sought ways to stamp out the metahuman contagion, as you know," the Dominator explained, clearly amused at Barry's distress. "But in secret, I sought a way to harness their powers, although many, unfortunately, died before I discovered the key to the procedure. I would've enjoyed controlling the weather," it quipped, sending another Tokamak blast his way. Barry sped to safety.

"All these years, and you show this off now?" Barry tried to taunt, though his voice betrayed how unnerved he was, and how sick he felt, thinking of all the other metahumans who had died in the Superior's experiments.

"Oh don't misunderstand me," the alien continued, almost conversational. "You metas are still abominations in my culture. If my colleagues knew I had imbued myself with such abilities, I would be cast out as a monster."

"You were always a monster," Barry shot back. The reply he received was more playing cards flying at his head. He caught them with his speed and flung them back, but the Superior had already teleported to a new location, where it continued talking.

"I have been unable to reveal what I've achieved for so long, but when the Green Arrow came skulking around our compound, I knew I finally had an opportunity to set a trap for you."

Barry's blood ran cold for a moment. _The Superior knew about Oliver?_

"I fed him details that would allow him to map the way to this chamber," the Superior continued, clearly enjoying its opportunity to brag. "Overheard conversations. Schematics left open on screens. He never knew he was leading his precious Scarlet Speedster to his final end." Another Tokamak blast, this one seemingly just for emphasis.

"And now here we are, sealed in by the force field around the chamber. No escape for you. No cameras or windows. No one to see what I can do. No one to see how I'll kill you."

"You know, I distinctly remember telling you to tone down the grandiose villain taunts," Barry replied. Despite the Superior's smug belief that it had played Oliver, its description of how it had fed information only convinced Barry that, in fact, Oliver knew exactly what the Superior was doing. There was simply no way he would have been duped that easily, which meant Oliver knew this was a trap and sent Barry in anyway. The only reason he would do that would be because he saw not a trap, but an opportunity.

He would only have sent Barry in if he knew Barry could win.

"Like I said before, when you taunt," Barry said, tensing up, "you get surprised."

…

 _Restrict its movement_.

Barry's thoughts on Oliver focused his mind, getting him over the shock of a Dominator with metahuman powers. He fell back on the combination of Oliver's training and the science of S.T.A.R. Labs, two pillars that always served him well as he grew as a superhero.

Streaking around the dome as Tokamak blasts and Double Down cards pursued him, he used his speed to punch out lights he could reach and threw lightning at those he couldn't, quickly shrouding half the gymnasium-sized room in darkness before sharply redirecting himself towards the Superior. It teleported away, but as Barry expected, it could only get so far before hitting the edge of the darkened region, a fact that seemed to catch the alien off guard.

"Surprise," Barry said, before landing a thunderous punch. The Superior flew back several feet, and Barry sped away, aiming for more lights.

"What is this?!" the Superior snarled.

"You don't seem like you have a good bedside manner," Barry called out, taking out yet another light, "so you probably didn't bother to ask the metas about the limits of the powers you stole." Barry audibly tsked. "That's sloppy science."

" _Stop it!_ " it screamed, sending more Tokamak blasts Barry's way but only hitting a blank part of the dome.

"Peek-a-Boo could only teleport within her line of sight," Barry explained, punching out yet another light. "If you can't see it, you can't get to it."

A Dominator shriek of frustration rewarded his efforts. Barry had now shrouded the majority of the windowless chamber in darkness, herding the alien to a far side of the dome, where it was zealously defending the final few lights that hung above it. It still had enough breathing room to give it a chance at dodging, but both of them knew Barry had negated one of its crucial advantages. Following the streak of light that accompanied Barry when he ran, the Dominator threw a huge fan of playing cards at him.

 _Take away its options_.

Barry, now in a mental zone, zoomed through the field of cards, picking off most of them and sending them straight back at the Dominator in a wide fan of his own that left it nowhere to run within its lighted area. Having no other choice, the Dominator physically dove into the darkness, and Barry blew past it with another shuddering punch. "Surprise," he taunted, before running away again.

Enraged, the Dominator's body swirled with streaks of red and orange, and it extended its hands outwards for a massive Tokamak blast.

 _Use its power against it._

Barry, just managing to stay ahead of the Tokamak blast, ran behind the white energy beam in the center of the room and the invisible force field that protected it. In attempting to follow him, the blast ran straight into the force field, and a bright flash accompanied by an intense sizzling signaled a catastrophic shutdown of the system as the Tokamak stream drained away its power. The field protecting the energy beam, and the console that controlled it, went down, and without even thinking about it, Barry was at the console, thrusting both of his vibrating arms into the electronics until the entire mechanism fried.

"NO!" A sickening crack sent Barry's face sideways as his body suddenly lost its equilibrium, and before even hitting the ground, he was enveloped in red-and-orange tendrils, his energy being drained even as every single nerve burned with agony. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he realized the white energy beam itself was a light source, giving the Superior a small ring in which to teleport when the force field came down.

Though he wasn't sure how, he ended up on his back, the spindly, withered form of Earth's tormentor towering over him, a deadly claw extended. "You die," the Superior hissed, beady black eyes desperate for murder.

The Tokamak blast had done its work, draining the last of his strength. After opening the decoy breach, after running for his life around this dome, after having his energy sucked out multiple times, after four decades of war, he was done. He couldn't vibrate. He couldn't run. He couldn't fight.

 _No more_ , he thought to himself, his vision clouding as the light flickered in front of his eyes and a claw pierced his suit.

…

 _Author's notes: Again, there was inspiration from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in this chapter, specifically from Aida after getting her new body._


	10. Chapter 10

April, 2016

 _That's strange_ , Cisco thought to himself, picking up the tachyon device from his workbench. _I thought I left this in Barry's suit_.

Yet here the device was, lying innocuously in his shop, out in the open. A quick check confirmed that it held data from Barry's run onto Supergirl's Earth, but how it had mysteriously jumped out from under the Flash suit's chest piece was unclear.

Cisco shook his head. He didn't have time for this right now. Zoom had taken Barry's speed, everyone was powerless to stop him, and Caitlin was still missing. He locked the tachyon device safely in a drawer and left the shop.

November, 2016

"They're calling themselves the 'Legends,'" Oliver explained.

"Egotistical, but catchy," Thea quipped, tilting her head.

"Do you know where they are?" Barry asked.

Oliver paused for a beat, eyes evasive as he sought a way to explain his knowledge of the timeship from the future. "I know where they _were_."

"Perfect," Felicity brightened. "That's all I need."

October, 2016

"…you know, whenever you alter the past, those changes affect the present and get compounded…"

 _Allen, what have you done_?

Rip sat at the back of the Waverider bridge, among the artifacts of centuries past and future, his hand over his eyes as he listened to the strange message he had received from the future Barry Allen. He was beyond exasperated that the speedster had managed to make his life even _more_ difficult, and he was just grateful he had intercepted the recording during the night shift, when the rest of his crew was asleep.

"…you return, you will be in the new timeline I created, where everyone's past and everyone's future has been affected, including yours."

 _Haven't you done enough to my life?_

"When you come back, don't trust anything or anyone. Not even me."

The message seemingly at an end, Rip immediately considered deleting it and forgetting about its existence. He already was forced to attribute a great deal of how his life had progressed up to that point to the Scarlet Speedster, and he was _not_ inclined to add more connections to the meddlesome Flash. How did he even know this message was genuine and not some fabrication? He was just about to issue the command to Gideon for deletion when the message suddenly continued after a pause.

"Rip," the message began again, and the captain started, hearing an even more wearied and regretful tone than the speedster had yet presented in his message. "I know you blame me for not saving your family. I know you hate me for giving you the Legends' names and misleading you into thinking that forming the team could change the fate of your wife and son. I know saying how sorry I am doesn't begin to address what you've sacrificed."

Rip heard a sigh. "But I also know that the Legends have become as much of a new family for you as you ever thought possible, and if you don't believe in my intentions to save Earth, at least believe in my intentions to protect your team. They're my friends too, and they're not the only ones in danger."

Rip narrowed his eyes. _What a surprise_ , he thought sarcastically, though without any real venom to the words. In fact, he was actually resigning himself to the possibility the message was, in fact, genuine. "I don't know if the day will ever come when you'll forgive me, but please Rip, help me save them. I trust you." With that, the message cut out for real.

Rip wasn't sure how long he sat in silence, contemplating what he had just heard, but Barry had clearly known what he was doing, appealing to Rip's growing protectiveness of the Legends. There was still so much they didn't know or understand about the nuances of time travel, and there were still so many aspects of it that could threaten their lives. If he wanted to be a good Captain, and a good friend, he would have to start preparing them for the unexpected, and perhaps, for the times when he wouldn't be there to guide them.

Almost as if on cue, an alert sounded in the bridge indicating the emergence of a new time aberration. Still debating how best to utilize this new information from the future Flash, Rip brought up a holographic copy of the message. "Gideon," he began, highlighting the second part of the message, the part that Barry devoted to asking Rip to trust him. "Delete this part of Mr. Allen's message." There were too many personal details in there that his team didn't need to know, including the real reason he had chosen them in the first place. Someday, in his own time, he would tell them that himself. "Save the rest to the secret armory."

"Yes, Captain," Gideon responded.

 _I'll bring them up to speed later_. Rip went to the front of the bridge to check on the aberration. Apparently, his team was needed in France, in the year 1637, to protect King Louie XIII. _Brilliant_ , he thought wearily. _What could go wrong?_

Present, 2056 (Alternate)

Barry blinked.

The Superior had disappeared.

He glanced down at his suit. There was a hole in the material where the alien's claw had penetrated, along with a tiny bit of blood from a skin-deep puncture wound, but he was otherwise unharmed.

The white energy column was also gone. The power source to the Dominator ships hanging in orbit had been cut off, and the chrono-spatial field was no more. Glancing at the Console strapped to his wrist, Barry saw its screen blink as it used the last of its power to execute Felicity's final command and transmit the message he had recorded back through time.

Most telling, Barry got the vague sense he could see through the walls of the dome to the outside. He looked at his hands and noticed that they were slightly transparent, and they were growing more insubstantial by the second. Soon, history would reset.

Sighing, Barry laid his head back down on the ground, believing for the first time he had finally done his part to honor the sacrifices of his allies and loved ones. Whether it was Rip bringing his entire crew to Earth's defense, or Wally time-traveling for the first time, or Oliver infiltrating Dominator labor camps, they had all played crucial roles in this story. Barry's job had simply been to add the final touch.

As the minutes passed and history erased him bit by bit, his thoughts, his feelings, and his consciousness grew more and more jumbled in the rewriting process, and he found himself with new memories of new events that had unfolded.

 _Dominator screeches of panic filled the air as the desiccated aliens turned tail and ran, yellow energy beams sucking them back up into their ship._

 _Nate reverted from his steel form into his human form. "They're retreating," he said, incredulity and relief coloring his voice._

" _It's not just them," Felicity breathed over their comms. "It's all around the world."_

 _High above them, the curved Dominator ship banked sideways and accelerated upwards into the atmosphere, away from Earth, as the Waverider and Firestorm hovered protectively nearby, fresh off their success in neutralizing the Dominator metabomb._

" _He did it," Oliver said, as the team on the ground watched the Dominator ship leave._

" _No, Oliver," Kara corrected._

Barry contentedly shut his eyes as he faded, finally reaching the end of his race.

" _We all did it."_

/end

 _Author's notes: Direct references and dialogue were used from The Flash 3x08, "Invasion!", and DC's Legends of Tomorrow 2x07, "Invasion!"_

 _The flashback with Rip is meant to be a direct lead-in to DC's Legends of Tomorrow 2x01, "Out of Time."_

 _Thanks for reading, liking, following, and/or commenting. I appreciate it all._


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